Hello everyone,

It’s funny to read my last post from back at the end of June…along with my crewmates I was moving our camping site to a sheep pasture to continue HAF monitoring in the foothills. Since then we’ve been also monitoring wetlands, attending trainings and moving on to working with thermograph data!

First of all, although we finished after the first week of July, it wouldn’t be right to leave out our last week of camping and HAF monitoring from this blog entry. The sheep pasture turned out to be a spot fairly close to the main road so that it wasn’t as remote, but far enough that we could take a quiet walk through the grassland or climb the hill behind our trailer to see the stars and watch the sun sink into the horizon at the end of the day. Those two weeks that we spent finishing HAF and living in that pasture definitely presented a whole new set of challenges and new experiences. In a way, it was like going back to the beginning of the season: we worked in unfamiliar roads in more remote sites that took longer to navigate and hike to. Also the vegetation species richness (amount of different species) just about exploded in the foothills, I’d never seen such a high forb density and we were taking plenty of specimens back to identify, so we learned a lot of new species! The fields of lupine and penstemon created a beautiful landscape of red, purple and yellow, you could even smell the lupine!

On the weekends, I’ve been going on some trips to explore the west, including Dinosaur National Monument, Ritter Island, Shoshone Falls and even Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming! On the way back, I caught a glimpse of northern alpine Colorado and I want to check it out more. But I am absolutely in love with Utah (so much like San Juan!), so I’m building up a list of places to hike and camp in on my way out at the end of the internship.

Living in a trailer, I realized how content I am living in small spaces. It’s cozy to be in a nook, taking up a small amount of space with a wild, empty expanse around you. Now that our fieldwork camping is at an end, we are driving from our field office daily to our work sites, often to collect data on wetland vegetation, attributes and map it on GIS. But now we are also downloading the thermograph data, which consists of using a GPS to find the thermograph apparatus, which is staked down in a stream pool collecting water temperature data and importing the data onto a field computer before re-launching the thermograph again to gather data for another year.

These thermograph streams are often in remote canyons, so we’ve been lucky to see a lot of cool landscapes, plants and rock formations. I love sitting back against an aspen and thinking about when the last human was last there.

Of course, in terms of some of the thermograph sites, someone visits them annually, but they probably don’t stop at the places we would stop or go further beyond the thermograph sites.  But leaning against this exact tree? Perhaps I am the first.

Working on wetland inventories takes us to more lush regions with access to water, so the vegetation tends to include riparian sedges and rushes.

Sometimes we’ll see birds, and we always are on the lookout for wildlife. I think we’ll also start Lepa monitoring (rare peppergrass species) pretty soon!

‘Till next time!

Maria Paula

Jarbidge Field Office

Twin Falls, Idaho