It’s hard to believe 5 months have already passed by.  If you had asked me one year ago where I would be now, I probably would not have said somewhere skirting the Sierra Nevada, with Lake Tahoe for a weekend playground. 

Working for the BLM has been a lesson in patience, planning and back-up planning.  Having been here for several months, I feel like I am finally getting my feet under me.  I don’t think I have ever appreciated the value of over preparation, until this position.  The mantra: plan on plans changing.  A trip to the field means plan for anything: GPS units failing, radios dying, people getting lost, extreme heat followed by extreme cold, or you may get reassigned to a new project entirely.  This type of uncertainty requires flexibility.  Being flexible means being versatile and with the vast amounts of land our district office oversees being able to change plans quickly means accomplishing more.  For instance, several weeks ago we drove to an HAF, sage grouse habitat site that was roughly 3 hours away.  After arriving at the site and spending a few hours looking for the pre-established transect plot we had found nothing.  At that point the day could have felt like a failure. Luckily we were aware of a rare plant population in the area that required a distribution survey.  Our team was able to quickly transition from one task to another without wasting our trip to such a remote site.  This situation also underscores the value of being familiar with the land uses and interests of the office you work in.  Often times the surveys we conduct apply to multiple disciplines in our office and knowing this allows you to plan well for appropriate data collection and management.