October 25th was National Public Lands Day. This is the day the public gets to volunteer for a couple of hours in the back country. Afterwards, everyone gets to mingle, eat food, and listen to some good music. It was nice to see the public interacting with everyone from the BLM. It’s always nice to feel appreciated for all the hard work we do managing the trails and the land. Although it was a lot of fun, it was also a lot of hard work.
The week leading up Public Lands Day, we each had specific tasks in order to prepare. One of my tasks was managing the volunteers at the new restoration site on Oil Well Road (it was being restored to decrease water channeling that was causing a gully). The heavy equipment crew had worked all the way until Thursday afternoon. I only had a few hours with the Weed’s Crew (Kelly, Daniel, Alex, and Ryan) to prep the site for the volunteers on Saturday. The plan was for the volunteers to drive up to the site and broadcast seed with sterile Barley (for soil stability) and cover the bare ground with straw (to provide protection for the seed and control erosion). With about two hours to go, the crew and I had to place one bale of straw every 800 feet to provide the right mount of cover. This was a lot harder than it sounds; the bales are awkward and heavy and it basically took two people to move each one. We also had to measure 20×40 feet to know where to place them. That turned out to be way too slow, so we began placing them 10-12 steps away from each other, figuring that the prior ones had roughly that much distance between them. However, even at this point, we still had to move over 200 bales of straw on a huge and steep restoration site. Obviously we didn’t get it done, and on Friday I only had Daniel and Alex to help me. We must have moved over 100 bales of straw, rotating with each other every so often to catch a break. We didn’t end up finishing the whole site, and then to top it off we also learned that it could potentially rain on National Public Lands Day. We figured that our volunteer turnout wouldn’t be as large if it did rain, and therefore they probably wouldn’t finish the entire site anyways.
My other task was placing BLM special event signs from the highway all the way to the back country. I met up with my mentor at 6:30 am on a SATURDAY and began placing the signs while it was still dark. As we are driving and placing the sign, he reminded me that we also needed to set up four plots to test the limited amount of Elymus glaucus seed! I raced up and began setting up 15.9×47.7 meter long plots on the site, which was difficult because it had begun to rain and the mud had caked on my boots and made them feel like 10 pound weights on my feet. By 10 am, I had them set up and as the volunteers arrived I gave them the run down of what the site was and what we are going to be doing. There ended up being about 15-20 volunteers that made it to the Oil Well restoration site, and they got about a quarter of it done.
We stopped, cleaned up, and took a group photo, then headed down to the festivities.
Two summer interns – Mandy and Stephan -got awards for all their hard work, and I was really happy to see them again. After we all ate, I had to run off and collect all the signs. Luckily for me, traffic was light.
I slept well after that day.
Cheers,
Manny -Fort Ord – BLM