View of Mt. Baker & the Picket range en route to the Islands

The last month has been pretty wonderful. I’m going try to keep this short n sweet but brevity isn’t always easy. I’ve had the great fortune of going from the archipelago of WA up to Mt. Baker, and the east slopes of the Cascades up in Okanogan county, and of course some butte, coulee, n plateau time was spent in that period to. My last month has been spent going from lush Westside forests, to dry Pondersa pine east slope mountain forests, to sandy beach maritime plants, back to the desert dunes, from sub-alpine and alpine back down to the steppe.

an Island in the archipelago near Lopez

I spent a week out on the San Juan Islands helping SOS intern Jen McNew make some collections. Collected some Bromus….sitchensis! and several other plants, Jen’s doing great work out there collecting and helping with the monument transition. Highlights were hanging out on the beach reading after work, tromping through isolated islands covered in old growth forest to hunt for wetlands, and the highlight was Lichens! Yes, I was told to go get a familiarity with some of the rare lichens which occur at Point Colville.  I was definitely a bit dusty on them (hadn’t keyed a lichen for nearly a half year since I did this), but it was incredible.  There was very high species richness and diversity, with many species occurring on substrates that they don’t occur on anywhere else.

Piperia elegans

Afterwards, I spent another week in the step and finished up my quota for sage-grouse geared collections. Since then I’ve just started to collect anything that is abundant.  I can’t remember how many collections I’ve made now. Working on lots of things that are covered in native pollinators, drought tolerant Penstemons in the spotlight.

My mentor Molly, found a large population (c. 2000) of the sensitive Nicotiana attenuata. She taught me how to map maps in real time using our GPS units, and then how to edit them with GIS to provide important contextual information. I was also able to collect seed from this species for a rare species seed bank at the UW.

Nicotiana attenuata

A condition of having finished up my grouse collections is that I can go into a different eco-type zone, the north north Washington that is in the Thompson Basin. This basin is Canada’s sagesteppe country, it also has lots of Pinus ponderosa forests due to the elevation. I’m able to collect a lot of forbs that grade in and out of the forest there and might be useful for forest wild fire restoration (areas within this ecotype zone have been burning real bad for the last few years). I love this land so much, it’s the Okanogan country, have always felt drawn to this area, and now I know why. Gorgeous.

So, my final highlight is botany Washington conference (held by the Washington Native Plant Society) on Mt. Shuksan (adjacent to Mt. Baker)! “Jenjus” (my name for the Jenny B. & Justin C. duo), and I were able to all go up there for this 3 day spectacular. So the theme of the event was “Islands in the Sky”- an attempt to think about how forests encroaching due to climate change would effect the continuity of sub-alpine meadows, as well as how this would effect pollinators dependent on these nectar and pollen sources. It was really great to be able to brainstorm on themes like this with experienced botanists and entomologists. Other incredible highlights were of course the alpine Saxifragaceae, Cyperaceae, & Ericaceae and a plethora of flowers, the views, being in a cloud for a day, rain(!!!!!), and…..THE PTERIDOPHYTA. The biggest appeal of this trip to me, and what made me have to go.

Botrychium pinnatum

This field-trips description promised we would see 30 ferns in one day and explore the effects of geology on plant community composition. I was skeptical, but it was DELIVERED! Our guide was incredible, he’s been a fern enthusiast since he was 14, and has found this ultra-mafic (and gneiss, and with calcium rich veins and more!) outcrop that (very likely) has the highest ferns species richness of any 100m area in US/Canada, furthermore many of the ferns are pretty to (very) rare, and and and there were many Botrychium spp.! While there were only a few representative individuals of the 5 species found up there (typically hundreds of each emerge each year, but ya know the drought story), it was incredible! My camera weird-ed out though so I only have one good pic. I was also able to get a much realer understanding of fern morphology than I had before.

THANKS KRISSA & REBECCA

"Can't talk to me without talking to you
We're guilty of the same old thing
Talking a lot about less and less
And forgetting the love we bring "

-Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead