Only a few more weeks left at the Eagle Lake Field Office and many things have started to change. Many of the trees have dropped their leaves and the weather has started to get colder. Most recently the mountains have been coated with a white sheet of snow. What a beautiful sight to see. I don’t get to see that in Indiana. The fieldwork has started to slow down. We sent off our last bags of seed to Bend Seed Extractory this week. As we reviewed all our seed collection data from the last five months I couldn’t help but feel accomplished. We collected lots of seed which will go to seed the Rush Fire. That’s pretty awesome!

Since seed collecting is over Landon, the Hydrologist in our office, asked if we could help him with one of his projects. So we’ve been going out looking for potential springs in the northern section of our field office. He had looked at aerial photos for evidence of green vegetation and produced a map of dots to be surveyed. All these points and potential springs will be surveyed so they can be entered into the National Hydrography Dataset. Since springs in the desert at this time of year are mostly dry we haven’t had much to report back. But we have seen some beautiful places and when we do find water it’s an exciting event. While we drive around we’ve seen lots of wildlife; mule deer, deer, pronghorn, badger, jackrabbits, burros, and many types of birds. It’s always so awesome to see them in the wide open spaces.

As this internship comes to an end new experiences and projects are still to be had. We’ll see what the next few weeks will bring.

Until next time.