I’m finally here!
For months, I have daydreamed about getting out of the Southeast and once again exploring the West. Now, at long last, I have packed up my things and driven the 1,500 miles separating the Appalachians from the Rockies.
One thing is for sure: I’m not in Tennessee anymore. The Wyoming Central Basin is just the sort of alien landscape I’ve been longing for – somewhere completely different, where I can take my next steps toward a career in conservation.
View of the Wind River Range from the Sagebrush Steppe.
After a first week filled with paperwork, training, and navigating a few unexpected developments, I’m finally out in the field, learning about an entirely new ecosystem, the Sagebrush Steppe. My mission: to identify suitable populations of selected species, collect seeds for use in reclamation, and to go where no Tennessean has gone before. The Rawlins field office has had an unusually cool, wet spring this year, presenting me with a unique opportunity to learn more about the early spring flowering species than I would have during a normal year. However, even under these unusual circumstances, many of my target species will be gone before I know it. The hunt for suitable populations is on!
Last Friday I collected voucher specimens and preliminary data from my first site – an old lakebed in the “Gas Patch”, a landscape now dotted with natural gas wells. While digging up Lomatium foeniculaceum and Cymopterus bulbosus, I quickly learned that the copious spring rains had done me another favor by softening the ground, making for relatively easy collection of these tough desert species!
Lomatium foeniculaceum (that taproot though!)
This week, my search took me past the Gas Patch, down to the Colorado border. In order to look for shrub species, I tagged along with an interdisciplinary team whose mission was to provide input to a proposed gas well site. Even amongst modern energy development, the vast rangelands and rough roads, set against a backdrop of the Sierra Madre mountains, made me wonder just how much has changed since the days of the western frontier.
The highlight of my week was a trip to the scenic Ferris Mountain Range (fun fact: the Ferris Mountains are the smallest east-to-west range in the world!). There, my mentor introduced me to some of Wyoming’s loveliest and most emblematic fora. To put icing on the cake, along the way we discovered suitable populations of Astragalus pectinatus and Viola nuttallii.
Whiskey Gap in the Ferris Range.
Castilleja, the state flower of Wyoming.
Faced with a wilderness full of species yet unknown, armed with my dichotomous key and trusty hand lens, I feel up to the challenges Wyoming has to offer me, and lucky to have this landscape be the setting of my development as a botanist and a conservationist.