My appreciation for the Great Basin deepens every day. Everything I do, anything form treating weeds to surveying for sensitive plant species, helps me to understand the landscape and how everything fits together. At the same time, the work has allowed me to spend extensive amounts of time in places I might have just driven by otherwise, places that might not have any dramatic features to draw in tourists but are still beautiful in their own right. For example, I wouldn’t recommend the Constantia Fire burn area as a must-see for people visiting the area, but I really enjoyed being out there in the foothills of the Sierras.

Red Rock Canyon, one of our survey sites

Favorite new-to-me plants:

Brown’s peony (Paeonia brownii) with its weird, ground-facing, meaty-looking flowers that sprout green, surprisingly-large, tusk-like pods when in fruit.

Clustered broomrape (Orobanche fasciculata): fully parasitic, non-photosynthetic plants that don’t really even have leaves. The entire plant is either yellow or pink. We dug one up and were able to see where it was growing directly out of a sagebrush root–an unexpectedly small root for how much plant mass was coming up.

The parasitic plant known as clustered broomrape