The landscape around Lakeview, Oregon is full of contrasts. Volcanic rims tower over rolling pastures and grazing cows. Electric green and orange lichens graffiti gray and brown cliffs. Golden eagles perch on telephone poles that dot the sides of the highway. It is a landscape that can seem at once both innocuous and magnificent.

My internship with the BLM here has allowed me to explore some of this amazing landscape. Fellow botany interns and I have spent much of our time thus far working on a botany clearance. This entails surveying a parcel of land for listed plant species, creating an overall plant species list of the area, and flagging large populations of invasive species. This particular parcel is about 1,000 acres, sliced into three sections by a diverging creek. We have hiked through (and sometimes over) a majority of it at this point, which varies from moss-encrusted soil to boulder piles spilling into the creeks. Grassy slopes lead to cliff walls that tower above the creeks. Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), bitterbrush (Purshia tridentata), and rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) fill out the parcel, where juniper trees have not encroached yet. We feel fortunate to be able to spend so much time on this diverse piece of land.

While we have not found any listed species at this point, we have found flowers hiding among the sagebrush and junipers, surprising us with their vivid color among the washed out greens and browns of their surroundings. The bright white and red of the bitter root (Lewisia rediviva), mottled purple and green of the purple fritillary (Fritillaria atropurpurea), and deep purple of Anderson’s larkspur (Delphinium andersonii) are a few of my favorites to find. Their beauty enhances the high desert backdrops that they grow against. It often feels like we have stumbled upon an open flower at just the right moment, as if we are the lucky audience for their performance of color in this fleeting spring.