Hey there! It’s Alexandra (Alex) live from Carson City, NV. It is now my 6 week in the internship. It was quite a pleasant weather shift, moving out here from the brutal winter Chicago has been experiencing! I find the scenery out here in the wild west amazing. The Chicago skyline is pretty cool at night and all, but I have to say, I love being able to look out my apartment window and see the Sierra Nevada Mountains!

After mainly doing plant biology research in a lab the past two years while working on my Master’s degree, working as a botany intern for BLM has reminded me how much I miss field work. I came out here knowing next to nothing about desert flora, and over the past several weeks, I’ve learned so many new plants. You look out into the Great Basin, and you think you are looking at a monoculture of mostly sagebrush, but once you venture out into it and creep around the desert floor, you begin to realize that there is diverse salad of wildflowers, grasses and shrubs. My favorite place we have visited is the Hardscrabble area/allotment. Another intern and I were surveying the riparian areas for noxious weeds, and we hiked up the canyon to a beautiful Populus tremuloides (trembling aspen) stand. This allotment is adjacent to Pyramid Lake, and we had a stunning view of it from there (sorry I don’t have a photo). All is well so far, more to come soon!