Hey fellow CLM interns.

We were warned over and over again, but we brushed it off as if it wouldn’t happen. Not until it was too late did we finally understand, summer is coming. Temperatures reached the mid-90s this past week here in the Columbia Valley. And while those that are positioned in more desert conditions have already embraced this reality, I was not expecting it so soon up here in Washington. When I think of Washington, snow capped mountains and cool weather come to mind, not 94°F in early May. It’s fixing to be a steamy sesh this summer season.

Besides dealing with the heat and trying to get some sun on these oh so white legs of mine, we finally got some valuable work done in the past 2 weeks. The first turf war broke out. On team Alliance we have yours truly, two other interns, and.. Oh! Right! The entire BLM district of Washington. Our opponent? The vigorous, unwelcome, overzealous, and just plain greedy Cardaria draba, or whitetop. Native to Asia and western Europe, this frustrating herb was introduced accidentally in the early 1900s, sneaky little buggers, and is pretty much all over the US except for a few southern states. I had never even heard of this plant before last week but now that I know what it is I see it everywhere! (interesting how that happens) 

The flowers are white, hence the name whitetop, and it’s an ugly weedy thing. (We’ll just ignore the irrelevant comment my coworkers and I made on liking ‘the unknown pretty white flowers’ next to the road while driving a few weeks earlier, we were young and foolish)

Anyways, going off topic. The whitetop popped up in an area that burned in a wildfire last year called Sleepy Hollow, right next to town. It was in bloom last week and easy to spot, so our supervisor decided it would be a good time to map it so that it could be provided to a contractor to be sprayed next year. So up to the foothills we went and using a combination of ArcPad and a topographic map, we recorded all the obvious spots.

What the whitetop patches look like when blooming up at Sleepy Hollow

After getting all those down, we spent this week going back and forth between working on putting the drawn out spots off the topo map into NISIMS, and going out do some mechanical treatment aka hand clipping seed heads. This perennial plant is rhizomerous, so just clipping the the flowering head off won’t stop it from spreading.  BUT the lack of spawn to disperse will slow it down. Unfortunately, there were only a few of us to work on it and even the small patches take a while to clip, so we didn’t get very far this week. And it seems they are quickly going to seed and will probably have them all dropped by the end of next week. So unless there is an industrial sized seed vacuum that someone forgot to tell us about, I’m afraid there’s only so much we can do for now. No matter, the point was to have the spots recorded into NISIMS and a map to provide for a spraying contract so mission accomplished! We will be going similar activities at other areas that were burned in the last few years. Most of them have already been seeded/treated and we are going to monitor how things are coming along, what invasives are present, and the most appropriate course of action to take.

We drove to a few other sites on Thursday this week to see what was going on. Each site had been treated differently and it was neat to physically see the results. The first site was treated by using a hose off of a truck to spray Russian knapweed, the second was aerially sprayed to control the bulbous bluegrass, the third was aerially seeded, and the last was left alone. Invasives were present in the all the sites but the last one had the fewest, however, I think that may have been due more to the site location. Oh and I also found something cool at the last site. 

I don’t know cars very well but I think this one may be totaled.

Until next time!

Katherine