I had always figured the desert was going to be a hot place.  That’s just part of the whole “Desert” deal…You get sand, cacti, and heat.  I knew that going into this job.  However, knowing and experiencing are two totally different things.  It’s similar to jumping into a mountain lake. You KNOW it’s going to be freezing, you’re geared up for it and mentally prepared, but once your feet hit the water everything changes.  You gasp for breath and can’t think coherently, even though you KNEW it was going to be freezing.  That being said, it was obviously hot, very hot in the Arizona summer.  The saving grace was that most of our work was in water and early in the morning so usually the heat was not a huge issue while working, even though I’m not sure “breathable waders” manufacturers know the correct definition of the word “breathable”.

Besides a few days here and there where we did work in the middle of the day, we were able to beat the heat on the job, although I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time on blacktop.  Sidenote: I’m still not sure how all the high-schoolers handled football practice during July and August but that’s neither here nor there.  A week or two ago I was absolutely shocked when I went outside one morning to get something from my truck and legitimately shivered.  My brain had no idea what to make of that, but there was definitely an internal celebration because autumn had finally gotten to Southeastern Arizona.  Growing up in Texas (where it’s also absurdly hot), fall was always my favorite season because it meant that you could be outside running around doing whatever, without suffering from heat stroke.  I realized not much has changed since childhood, because I immediately perked up the first time I had to put a jacket on. (They also evidently don’t believe in Daylight Savings Time in Arizona, so come November it’ll mean more time working in the cool temperatures!).  A few weeks have passed since then, and we’re still in that awkward phase where you have to wear a jacket in the morning, then start overheating when the sun gets up, and then take it off but its perfect weather in my book.

The coming of Fall also means that we did our bi-annual monitoring of Aravaipa Creek.  If you are unfamiliar with Aravaipa, I would recommend looking it up.  It’s an absolutely stunning place, and considered the crown jewel of Southeastern Arizona and also of our field office (Edward Abbey even called it home for a while as a Ranger).  A good portion of the creek falls within BLM wilderness, along with The Nature Conservancy property, as well as a few private inholdings scattered in.  We teamed up with a group of students from the University of Arizona to monitor nine different sites along the creek for fish demographics.  Aravaipa Creek houses two species of endangered fish (Loach minnow, and Spike Dace) and this monitoring has taken place twice a year since 1963 to assess different statistics about how they are doing.  It was a wonderful experience because A. I got to work in a beautiful and almost unknown area of the country, B. I got to interact with a lot of like-minded people in my age range (You’ll never believe it, but there aren’t a lot of young conservationists in a ranching/mining town of 10,000 people) and C. It’s an extremely fulfilling feeling knowing that you are doing your part as a cog in the machine of something much larger than yourself.

That last sentence I think sums up the number one thing I have gotten from this job.  I wrote on a previous blog post that our main project is removing invasive fish species from a creek within a national conservation area.  When I first started, if I was in a bad mood or a sleep-deprived/lack of caffeine state of mind it was easy to think of negative thoughts like “Well, how big of a difference can one person make?… It’s just one creek, even if we remove all the invasive species, it’s just one creek. How big of a difference will that even make in the broad spectrum of the world”.  After reading blog posts on here for a while though, an epiphany hit me like a ton of bricks, and it has made all the difference both in this job and my outlook in the future of nature.  Ya, I’m just one dude slowly but surely repairing and ecosystem.  Just by myself, I’m making just a mere blip on the radar in conservation.  BUT, I’ve read about people doing the same thing in Alaska, In California, In New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, the Eastern U.S and probably others I’m forgetting.  My point being is that to save the world, it takes a village.  One person has nowhere near the amount of man power to do everything that needs to be done to conserve the natural world, but if a large group of people that truly believes that they are making a difference in their neck of the woods do their part, then we all act as spokes and keep this wheel moving.  Hopefully the students we worked with this past weekend enjoyed the work enough to enter this line of work and add to the number of people working toward a common cause.  Hopefully someone somewhere has seen what you are doing and understands how important it is and has been inspired to do the same.  Hopefully you can see a goal involved in what you are doing, because it gives you a perceptible meter of how your project is going and something to strive for.  And finally, hopefully everyone reading this has had a least one “Ah-Ha” moment where you have seen success in your project and felt that extremely rewarding feeling inside of you where you look across the landscape and honestly tell yourself that you HAVE made a difference.

Anyways, I’m going to hop off the soap-box for now, best of luck to those finishing up their time with the CLM program, and good luck to those continuing.  As Fall continues and dips into Winter I’ll write again.  In the meantime keep trekkin’ along, saving the world.

Theres somethin’ about those Saguaros…

Taylor.