This week my two fellow interns and I started our stint on the BLM Carson City botany team. As a California girl who has been chasing summer around the globe for the last 2 years, I was more than a little anxious about moving to 4800 feet in the middle of winter. Being surrounded 
by snowy mountains and bundling up for even a brief trip outside might seem normal to many, but for me it is new and exciting. I love the landscapes of the arid West in all seasons, and under snow they are even more magnificent.
Due to muddy road conditions, most of the field sites we’ll use this season are inaccessible, but we did get to take a short trip to a restoration site worked on by last year’s crew. We wandered around the site, reviewing familiar species and encountering new ones, while learning about the history of the site and BLM’s role in management. This project has the potential to be a model for restoration using only native species, something that can be controversial in agencies that represent the interests of multiple groups: recreational users, ranchers, conservationists, fire crews, and more. I’m already learning a lot about the opportunities and challenges presented by working for a federal agency, and the remarkably broad impact of these organizations.
Other than training and a few field trips, we spent some time working with herbarium specimens collected by previous interns. I’m not shy about admitting that I am a hardcore plant systematics nerd, so getting to key out plants and check out the huge collection in the UNR (University of Nevada-Reno) herbarium was like being a kid in a candy store. I also got to realize my childhood dreams of doing arts and crafts for a living, as we spent an afternoon mounting pressed plant specimens. There is nothing that compares to the aesthetic appeal of a perfectly mounted, beautiful plant specimen, wouldn’t you agree? I am really looking forward to keying out, pressing, and mounting our own specimens once we start collecting seeds in a few months.
If I get to identify plants and look at snow-covered mountains every day, I think I could get used to the cold…
Britney Zell, Carson City BLM