Greetings everybody!

Looks like everybody is having a great time! I love all the picutres up on the blog right now. Sadly, I am the worst at taking non-work related pictures..I promise my newly-back-at-work resolution will be to take more pictures!

So I’ve been back at work for three weeks now (this is my third CLM internship, and my second one here in Montrose, CO) and I’ll tell you what, my “tor”-mentor is getting his money’s worth! Straight back into things! But I absolutely adore this job so it’s been great to get back to work. Let’s see, so far I’ve:

• spent a week doing Sclerocactus glaucus (only the cutest cactus on the western slope!) monitoring with the awesome CLM Denver crew (shout out to Nathan, Phil, and Carol!!)
• jumped right back into rare plant surveying – hunting down Payson Lupine and Naturita Milkvetch in the west end and discovering our first population of Naturita Milkvetch here on our side of the plateau (only Phil, Nathan, please tell Carol that I only found a total of 18 Naturita Milkvetch’s at that site in Escalante…which means that we collected like, 10% of the populaion with our two samples…)
• aaaaand I’ve also been going out in the field and checking on some old data we have for various species of Oenothera for Miss Krissa at the CBG who I will hopefully get to meet sometime in the near future when she comes out here to do some work with Oenothera (check out her lab! http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/skogen/index.html, her research is pretty darn neat!)

Isn’t it adorable!?

So that’s the skinny on what’s been going on so far! Looking forward to some cool things coming up!! Lek count tonight/early tomorrow morning, High Lonesome Ranch cactus work (where I will hopefully meet the cowboy of my dreams and we’ll ride off into the sunset together!!), river trip to survey cactus down the Escalante strip of the Gunni (that’ll be awesome, the river rangers are kinda the cool kids at the office – the football players, if you will, and while I’m just a band nerd they’re really nice to me!), aaaaand then my sister will be in town and we’re gonna rage a quick trip to Moab! (And that only takes us to the middle of May!) I promise I’ll try to take some awesome pictures to make my blog more readable.

Also – I would just like to point out that my “tor”-mentor has been staring over my shoulder this whole time, correcting my spelling errors.

Your Cohort –

Brandee Wills
Uncompahgre Field Office BLM
Montrose, CO