Hills, hills, and more hills

I’m actually nearing the end of my internship now and I can’t believe how fast time has gone. In all honesty, I will be relieved to leave the desert but I will definitely miss all the cool rock formations, the smell of sagebrush, and the nice roads for road cycling. This week has been a particularly rough week of hiking. We were first working in Baker City doing vegetative monitoring in an ACEC at Hunt Mountain and later in the week, we surveyed for Pyrrocoma radiata, an aster. Both jobs required walking along some serious slopes (probably up to 60 – 70%). I now know that just because something looks inaccessible doesn’t mean that it is.

Despite the rough hiking, working at Hunt Mountain near Baker City has been my favorite part of the whole summer. Our first trip there involved conducting white bark pine blister rust surveys with several different forest service employees. I was incredibly happy to be working with trees again and found the lesson on tree diseases to be really interesting. The level at which each individual tree was infected varied greatly and sometimes making the diagnosis was much more difficult than you would expect. The trees living on these slopes were already under a great deal of stress from the climate that they had to endure on a regular basis, so few looked extremely healthy to begin with. However, some showed symptoms (rough bark, animal chew, spores, tar, and swelling) much more than others.

The spores need moisture in the air to lead a successful infection. Wet, cool conditions are perfect. So the warming, drying trend of climate change might actually be good for slowing blister rust spread? Wrong. According to the forest service employees, Baker City and the surrounding area might be a rare place that actually experiences greater precipitation with climate change. Bad news for the white bark pines. I am very interested in this phenomenon and am considering studying it through a PhD program, which I hope to begin next year.

A quick update on SOS: we have made 11 collections so far and we are coming very close to the end of the seed season. We only have one more population that we expect to collect from. Despite having had a few disappointments (species we thought we’d be able to collect that didn’t pan out), we think that we have done pretty well. Higher elevation areas have turned out to be the saving grace for this year’s drought.

Anyway, I think the next time I post, it will be for my final reflection!