Good Evening fellow CLM Interns!

I guess I’ll start with my trip to Salt Lake City for the first National Native Seed Conference. The trip from Carson City to Salt Lake City was long but I enjoyed seeing the beautiful landscapes of Nevada and Utah. Once we got to Salt Lake City I was awe struck with the beauty of the city, the parks, and neighborhoods. As we were driving to pick up our two newest interns we drove by the Mormon Temple, it is a beautiful building comparable to some amazing churches and cathedrals I have seen in my travels in Europe. Well after about an hour of driving up windy mountain roads we finally made it to the Lodge at Snowbird and the rooms were very nice. So to skip ahead to the conference it was an amazing experience, there were so many people from different fields and different agencies all coming together to give the latest information to help all the other agencies with issues such as native seed collection, native plant propagation, restoration ecology, importance of native pollinators, population genetics, and global warming. I particularly enjoyed the presentations on restoration ecology projects and information of native pollinators; all presentations are available on www.nativeseed.info

Now the past two weeks have been very busy, two weeks ago we spent three days camping out on the range helping the BLM range staff conduct a visual assessment of the health of the range. It was a lot of work but we got quite a bit done and it was an educational experience learning about conducting surveys and assessments. One of the nights we went camping was at this beautiful campsite along the shore of Pyramid Lake, it was a small grove of Willow Trees which gave us some shade and a nice change of scenery instead of the usual sight of Sagebrush. That night we burned logs of Sagebrush and Juniper, the smell coming from the fire was amazing; actually I started the campfire myself with a magnesium stick and flint with a knife, I wanted to try to be that guy from that show Man vs Wild. Last week was a full week; we were out in the field every day. Wednesday was awesome we met with members of the Fish and Wildlife Service and they took us to an island in the middle of Pyramid Lake, it is a wildlife area where pelicans go to nest, the boat ride back was amazing being out there on the water and seeing the flocks of pelicans flying alongside us was very memorable. Thursday after working with the BLM range staff again we camped at a mesa nearby, half of us camped at the mesa’s base and the rest camped on the mesa; I didn’t camp on the mesa but I did hike to the top and it was beautiful. The night we spent there was quite exciting because in the middle of the night a coyote came into our campsite and started yelping and howling not far from my tent, at first I was scared but eventually I thought the howling was kind of cool.

Well never a dull moment here in Carson City

See you all soon at the Grand Canyon

Doug S

BLM, Carson City