Wyoming- big skies, big landscapes, and lots of sagebrush. While there are some things I don’t enjoy (mostly the heat), Wyoming is a pretty great state. I love watching pronghorn run across the sagebrush and dodging young calves as they scamper away from our car as we drive to our field sites. Even the afternoon thunderstorms add a certain excitement to the day.

Pronghorn fawns running across the road

Lander is a great town. With a population of 7,400 people, it’s big enough to have almost everything you could need- two grocery stores, one movie theater, a library, and gas stations galore. Plus, the mountains are only six miles away- what more could you ask for?

View from a weekend hike in the Wind River Mountains

It’s been a month since I started work at the BLM. Over the past few weeks I have gone out with field crews monitoring prairie dogs and sage grouse, visited rare plant populations, met some of the other CBG interns at the workshop in Chicago, and identified lots and lots of plants.

One of my favorite days was during my first week of work. It was the day we visited the main population of Yermo xanthocephalus, a rare plant that is endemic to Wyoming and can only be found in the Lander Field Office. The plant was not discovered until 1991, when a botanist came across it while doing surveys for a proposed gas pipeline. Needless to say, the pipeline was laid elsewhere.

Yermo xanthocephalus from the original population

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the second Yermo population with our field office’s botanist. She had received reports of strange activity in the area, so we went to investigate. When we got to the site, we thoroughly searched the areas that the plant was last seen in. One of the points no longer contained any plants, and another had only one. There were PVC pipes in the ground around the area, and new tracks near the population. On the bright side, the view from the area was incredible.

The view from the second Yermo population

It was amazing to see such a rare plant and all of the effort that goes in to monitoring it. While I don’t think rare plant monitoring is in my future, it was interesting to learn about the process and politics of protecting plant populations. It is important work, and hopefully it will allow rare plants like the Yermo to exist long into the future.