July marks the halfway point of my internship.  It also marks the beginning of a long spate of extremely hot weather.  I have learned that eastern Oregon is perhaps the worst climate to attempt to grow tomatoes in.  They barely survived a late-May frost and, after making a come-back, are now wilting under the 108 degree weather.  I also feel like I’m wilting under the weather.  Even the night time temperatures are not very cool.

We have had a lot of SOS activity lately, completing our sixth collection today.  All the seeds are starting to go all at once and we are trying to get them before it’s too late.  Even the bitterbrush that we were collecting this week had noticeably drier seeds today than yesterday. 

Perhaps our most fun collection was a barton berry we helped the Baker City botanist with.  Barton berry is endemic to Hells Canyon, on both the Idaho and Oregon side but there is a gap in its distribution alongside the river.  The BLM is hoping to collect seeds in order to plant barton berry into this gap.  We stayed overnight in Baker City and then were greeted with the amazing sight of Hells Canyon: thousands of feet of rock cliff faces rising up out of a reservoir.  The two days we spent collecting there felt a little bit like working in a outdoor enthusiast’s playground.  We spent a lot of time clambering up rocks to reach elusive patches of barton berry that had a tendency to sprout up on talus slopes.

We witnessed our first wildfire yesterday, passing by on our way to work up on a mountain.  Despite the amount of smoke in the air, it was surprising to see the fire as just a thin, low line working it’s way up a slope.  I had the realization that our fires probably cannot compare in intensity to Colorado or Arizona or anywhere with dry woodlands.  We have so few trees that the fire cannot reach very far off the ground.  I made the mistake of thinking it almost seemed tame until we returned the next day and saw the huge swath of land that it had managed to burn in less than 24 hours.  Lesson learned: never underestimate the power of wildfires, even seemingly small ones.

One of my favorite flowers