Well, my internship has drawn to a close. It has been an immense pleasure to be able to spend the greater portion of five months in the field. The opportunities that avail themselves when living in the rural west are incredible.

I’m pretty happy with the work I was involved with. I think SOS is an awesome program, and I’ll be interested to see how it develops in the next decade. I’m very proud of the accessions I was able to add to their collections-and doing so was a very rewarding experience. I was able to make 24 collections; but they are sorely lacking in some vouchers and pictures-of the original 30 plants I took vouchers from and monitored the progression of only a handful were able to be collected-but opportunity can be found in any parched, scorched, ravine in the steppe, again…and again… I spent a bit of my spare time studying genetics, plant demography, plant communities, and reading other assorted things to help guide my collection techniques and choose/prioritize plants; I think that this was an incredible way to study this sort of material.  I’m also really happy to be able to feel like I’ve got a really good feel for the sage steppe flora.

sitting in the snowfall.

I was enthralled to be in a ‘seasonal town’. For the last few years I’ve just been flat broke, that means only like 5-10 hikes a year. Having a job and basically already being in the mountains changed that! I’ve done a lot of the best hiking of my life this year. I still botanized a lot in my spare time too. Highlights looking back were: I went to this canyon (Swakane) to learn most of my sage-steppe plants early in the season, I recently learnt that the gentleman who wrote our flora (PNW-Hitchcock) use to do study weekends out there for decades with his friends. Another highlight were the endemic plants of the Wenatchee mountains. I think I saw about 20 endemics there this year- most of these rank in my (mental) top ‘most aesthetically appealing plants’ top 100. A final highlight was spending a lot of time in the sub-alpine and alpine and becoming familiar with those plant communities too. These are two groups of plants that I had no experience with until this year; and I’m very happy to now feel comfortable with my knowledge of the alpine, sub-alpine, east side forests, and sage-steppe areas of the PNW.

learn to ID dead things!

So I’ve learnt a lot about: plant ecology, orienteering, navigating, scheduling, planning, paperwork  (!),  dealing with people, keying a handful of new families, genetics, and monitoring. I’ve also cemented a lot of undergraduate knowledge that I would have probably ended up forgetting in a few years! I feel like a much more competent field worker now than I did five months ago, but I also still think I can grow significantly before pursuing formal instruction again.

So how does someone follow up something like this?

Well, easily discernible from the blogs is that most folks go to graduate school, right on! However, I’m not doing that, I’m going back to the analytical chemistry lab I work in as a phytochemist. I’m very excited to be able to reflect upon many of the interesting chemicals and their distributions throughout the steppe flora as I’m back at the bench. I’m also excited to hike the West cascades and Olympics for another year. I’ve also resolved to earn another bachelors as a part time student (I work in my old college town); this time in Plant Ecology (to supplement my B.S. in Plant Biology). I see how having a wider framework can be valuable for interpreting the natural world, and how a enhanced skill set can be an asset for various projects.

Thanks for opportunity Krissa, Rebecca & Molly.

SMILES

hey Justin, the fifth stratovolcano!

“And the seeds that were silent all burst into bloom, and decay
And night comes so quiet, it’s close on the heels of the day”