Alpine, Desert, Alpine: Fieldwork in Colorado – 9/2/2013

Sometimes working in Colorado feels a bit like working in a 30-minute nature special, with a different ecosystem after every commercial break. Our team from the BLM Colorado State Office has spent the past month crisscrossing the state–going from alpine tundra to Mancos Shale desert and back again, then on to aspen-spruce woodland and the sand dunes of the North Sand Hills– to monitor rare plants and continue to collect seeds for Seeds of Success.

In late July, we collaborated with some folks from the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, the Colorado Natural Heritage Program, and the Mosquito Range Heritage Initiative to monitor Eutrema penlandii (alpine fen mustard), a rather diminutive plant that grows in some very beautiful alpine sites. E. penlandii is, in fact, endemic to Colorado’s Mosquito mountain range, placing it about 1000 miles away from its closest relative E. edwardsii in the Canadian Arctic. This trip was one of my favorites: it was a great opportunity to hike and work amid some breath-taking scenery as well as to interact with and get to know some great people from a variety of agencies and organizations.

We followed up this trip with more monitoring–this time working on Sclerocactus glaucus, or Colorado hookless cactus, around the Mancos Shale formations in Delta County. The Montrose field office gave us a lot of help, and we were excited to work with Brandee Wills, a fellow CLM intern, who has been stationed in Montrose for a few months, but whom none of us had met. It felt almost like being reunited with a long-lost twin of some kind… Brandee was great to work with, and I really enjoyed meeting her.

More trips followed as we traveled to the Piceance Basin–where well pads sprout up faster than the pinyon and juniper–to monitor Physaria congesta and P. obcordata. We then took a break from monitoring to revisit a promising seed collection site at Dyer’s Gulch near Leadville. We found an incredible array of alpine wildflowers in bloom, including some really beautiful gentians and asters, as well as the Colorado blue columbine (Aquilegia coerulea) that we’ve had our eye on at various stages of flower and fruit.

Last week, I was very pleased to finally make a collection of Frasera speciosa, a monocarpic forb that, in flower, can reach 6 feet in height. It is an easy one to spot from the highway, with its distinctive, unbranched green flowering stalk, and I was starting to feel that it had been taunting us from private land along roadsides wherever we went. Luckily, thanks to Megan McGuire, the wildlife biologist at the Kremmling field office with whom we’ve worked quite a bit, we (that is, she) managed to find a large population of F. speciosa on BLM land in a lovely aspen-spruce woodland. It turned out to be quite enjoyable, and one of my favorite collections, as we stood in the shade (shade?) of trees (trees?!) and collected bountiful seeds held conveniently at arm-level by a forb that was taller than I am.

Most recently, we traveled to North Park to monitor Phacelia formosula (again with Megan’s help) as well as to do a quick seed collection of Heterotheca villosa while we avoided being mowed down by rogue dune buggies in the North Sand Hills. Field season has continued to keep us busy, and I’ve loved the opportunity to travel to an array of interesting landscapes and to meet and work with new people.

Cameron amphitheater- Eutrema penlandii monitoring site

A small but wizened Rocky Mountain Bristlecone Pine (Pinus aristata). I have a major Plant Crush on these trees and was thrilled to see them for the first time.