After a drizzly Saturday of cross-country skiing at Lake Tahoe, I was awakened by the sun pouring through the big windows next to my bed. It was almost 7 a.m., and I put on some hot water for tea. I checked my email on my phone, and was greeted by a late-night email from Dean, our mentor. He was going on a last-minute rare cactus survey, the results of which were due the next day – did any of us want to come along? He was leaving for the field in less than three hours.
One of my fellow interns and I went into high gear to prepare for the field. We scrounged together a little food, packed some clothes and gear, and bid goodbye to our other two housemates / interns who decided to stay home.
The drive to the field site took us through vast basins of sagebrush, sagebrush, and more sagebrush, dotted with occasional groups of grazing cattle or wild horses and rimmed by dramatic mountains. We spent the day searching for Grusonia pulchella (sagebrush cholla), a BLM sensitive species, near proposed mining sites. The first challenge was finding the sites, which were marked by a (sometimes fallen) wooden post that looked very similar to the multitude of other posts scattered throughout the area. We didn’t have GPS coordinates for the points, so we used a printed map with sometimes inaccurate points provided by the mining company. Getting to the points required driving on some semi-sketchy 4-wheel drive roads and subsequent rock scrambling, but we were rewarded by some amazing views.
We surveyed eight sites without finding any G. pulchella individuals, but we did find some other cactus species and were introduced to many new shrubs and forbs in the surprisingly diverse sagebrush community. We also found an historic sheep camp (evidenced by trampled soil and ubiquitous old sheep droppings), an old mining site complete with extremely rusty metal cans, and some Opuntia sp.(prickly pear cactus) individuals, all of which would be disturbed by mining activity.
Finally, on our last site of the day, we found the species we had been looking for! It was a tiny little cactus tucked in behind a small Artemisia arbuscula, and in the waning daylight we marked it with a GPS and flagging tape. I was struck by the fact that a mining company would be forced to change their plans because of the presence of this single rare plant – it really is awesome! Hooray for plant conservation!
We drove a short distance to a dry wash, set up our tents in the dark, and sat around my backpacking stove listening to the nighttime desert noises. Mostly, the noises consisted of crackling power lines and a mysterious high-pitched squeak/chirp/whine. I didn’t last long before crawling into my sleeping bag and falling asleep.
After a little more surveying and the drive back to the office the next morning, we spend the rest of the week doing trainings and attending a grass identification class at University of Nevada-Reno. We spent those two days of class with our eyes glued to the microscopes, picking apart tiny grass spikelets and sending glumes and lemmas flying across the table. Our eyes and bodies were tired after sitting still for hours on end, but now we are ready to identify any grass that comes our way – well, only if we are equipped with a microscope. After a long week, we were ready for another weekend of outdoor adventures before heading to Boise for a busy week of pest management class.
Britney, Carson City BLM