Theresa and I are so close to our target of 30 collections and it’s kind of amazing. In all honesty, if it wasn’t for some bad timing, we likely would have hit our 30 and surpassed it. Sometimes though, you just need to roll with what the season throws at you. Recently, we camped in Fillmore’s Field Office to collect the seeds from plants we scouted there about a month ago. It was moving along at a slower pace, and we thought we timed it pretty accurately. Unfortunately, Utah decided to have a week straight (and then some) of days over 100 degrees F and when we went to collect our seed, we were dismayed that the plants essentially got fried before the seed could even develop properly. So, instead of our trusty work truck being full to the brim of seed bags, we got about half the collections we intended to get. All is not lost however. Since we GPS everything, next years crew will be able to get the ones we missed out on this year.

Rural Utah has a sense of humor I can appreciate!

Return to Crystal Peak in Fillmore’s Field Office.

As of last week, we wrapped up a cool rare plant monitoring project by collecting a tiny amount of seed for a grow-out project the office is interested in. It was hot. It was dusty. Fire ate away one of our populations. And somehow, a road flooded, and we strategically had to maneuver off-road around it. Our truck hasn’t let us down yet though, which is a miracle considering we’ve logged over 7,000 miles on every sort of road and non-road imaginable. I probably just jinxed that luck now.

When not sweating out of every pore in my body during our work days, I have been enjoying the cool hikes the Wasatch front has to offer. I’m looking forward to some upcoming scouting in the higher elevation areas of our office since the mountains have seemingly exploded into bloom. It’s a breath-taking sight to see meadows thick with color.

Saving a mantis dude from our debugging process that we put the seeds through

-Corinne
SLFO