Wow, I can’t believe it’s the end of September. Time flies out here. It seems like I just started this internship. But what a wonderful experience I’ve been having. I’ve learned so much in the months since I’ve been here. Seed collecting, monitoring Special Status Plants, BLM’s AIM protocol for monitoring, map making using GIS, and countless others along with meeting really great people. The weather in the Eagle Lake Field Office is starting to get colder and the field work is starting to slow down. Now, begins the finishing of office projects which we (Deb and I) want to get done before this internship ends.
In the past few months we have been doing a lot of monitoring of Special Status Plant populations and collecting seed as part of the Seeds of Success program. We’ve spent a lot of time recently in the Sierra Valley which is the southern part of the field office. It’s such a beautiful valley we didn’t have a problem spending several days monitoring there. The plant populations we were looking for were Ivesia aperta var. aperta (Sierra Valley Ivesia), Astragalus pulsiferae var. pulsiferae (Ames’ Milkvetch), and also found Penstemon sudans (Susanville Penstemon).
Most recently we’ve been collecting a lot of native seed which will be used for helping the part of the field office which was affected by the Rush Fire last year. Valda, our supervisor and the ecologist, has sent us to find and collect Great Basin Wildrye and Curlleaf Mountain Mahogany. There is a great Mt. Mahogany stand on the top of Fredonyer Mountain (7789 ft.). We spent a few days collecting the irritating seed while wearing gloves resulting in several giant seed bags full of seed. She was very happy to see so much seed to say the least. And when we went back up the mountain the next day we found snow. It was everywhere in small piles and flurried the whole time we were up there. It was so pretty sticking to the fir and pine trees and the sun shining off it. We may have played in it a bit and took many pictures.
Snow on Fredonyer Mountain
Collecting Mt. Mahogany
I’ll miss the beauty of this place when my time here comes to an end.