To my surprise rain has finally returned to the Sacramento area, though we are still technically in a drought. This year it has been raining since October and hasn’t shown signs of letting up yet. Today we had to rush out to one of our BLM campgrounds just down river from the Yosemite Valley to move equipment to higher ground because this weekend heavy rains are predicted to wash our campgrounds clean. In a past flood, our picnic tables washed away, and finally retrieved them from where they were floating in the middle of the lake. I also got to learn a lot of neat history about the railroad that went through the campground when the area was being harvested for timber. This soon ceased because constant maintenance of the railroad from rockslides, floods, and washouts outweighed the financial gains from harvesting the timber.

Another project I am helping out with is looking at the pollinators of the native plants in our area. I went out to UC Davis to use their reference collection to identify some of our specimens. I also picked up some of our past specimens that we had identified by a specialist at the campus.

Other than this I have been scouting for native seeds to collect but things have been at a standstill it seems since it started raining.

A lot of other things have been going on but aren’t particularly noteworthy so I will end here.

-Landon

BLM Mother Lode Field Office