The decision to move to Oregon felt huge when I made it. Lakeview, Oregon seemed a world a way from my home in Iowa. As a graduation neared, however, I realized that I was ready for an adventure. As I look back now, I know that I made the right decision.

I live in the government trailers on the grounds of the Interagency Fire Center in Lakeview, Oregon with two Hawaiian fire fighters, a bat biologist, and my crewmate Molly. Combined with the archeologists living in the trailer in front of us and the other BLM-ers living in the trailer behind us, we make quite an eclectic mix. I enjoy coming home to this bustling community. Someone is almost always available to make dinner with or just talk to.

I work and live with Molly Baughman, another intern from Indiana. Molly and I split our internship time between 40/60 between fire ecology and seed collection. So far, however, we have been working almost exclusively on fire ecology portion. We work in beautiful and very remote areas. The BLM Lakeview district covers about 3 million acres so our sites are often far away. We have worked at Beatty Butte for the past four weeks. Early in our internship, we drove the two and a half hours to our sites from the Lakeview BLM office daily. Lately, with our new and improved high desert plant identification skills we have begun camping in the field and working without our supervisor to maximize our time. As a bonus we wake up to the unique beauty and though provoking isolation of sage country. We seldom see anyone else all week when camping.

As we approach our sites we start searching for the fence posts that mark individual plots. Often the initial search for our plots results in minor frustration (although we have improved with practice.) It requires a bit of luck, binoculars, time and some creative (abet cautious) driving. On our first day working without our supervisor, we turned down the wrong road and spent half a day searching in vain for a plot before realizing our mistake. Since our first attempt, we feel more familiar with the topography and have learned the importance of following maps. On that occasion, Molly ingeniously found our way by measuring out miles with a gummy bear — saving us from having to call our supervisor in defeat.

After finding our sites from the road, we hike to them and set up our transects. The transects we construct look like giant measuring-tape forks. We string sixty-meter tapes across the sage at thirty-meter intervals. Then, we walk along these and census plants at three-meter intervals using a quadrate. Through these transects, we have learned a lot about high desert plant identification. It feels really good to look around and recognize everything or almost everything that we see.

So far, it has been a great summer.

Amy Hadow

Lakeview, Oregon

BLM