Year two at the Kremmling field office has been good. I started this year a bit earlier (March 31st) due to the dry winter and early spring. A warm winter and hot April lead to a wet and cold May – June. It has been a weird season here in Colorado so far. In Steamboat Springs it rained every single day of May and Arapahoe Basin Ski Area received nearly 60 inches of snow in May. This dry winter leading to a wet and prolonged spring has created some weird work conditions for Colorado. The vegetation has really greened up and the wet roads have made scheduling work interesting. The Dry winter and lesser melt-off have allowed us to float the river throughout May and June, whereas last year we were limited to late July and August to float the river. This allowed us to get some good spraying in on the river, which really needed it. However, now that July is upon us we will be switching over to vegetation monitoring and put the spray rigs away.

Other than that, I am in the process of developing a Master’s thesis out here in conjunction with the BLM on assisted succession of slash pile burn scars. I am putting in 100 or so plots using some of the 1,000 freshly burned piles up on Independence Mountain. I will be using Quadrats to monitor several different treatment methods and to get species richness using percent cover of each plot. The Fuels/Foresters are very interested in this project to see what management strategies will work best to restore burned piles to a native stand and limit noxious weed invasions.

I have two months left in this internship and it feels like summer has just begun. The snow is just starting to melt off in the backcountry, so I have some backpacking to catch up on in these coming months.