I’ve been in my Fuels position for about three months now, and our post-fire rehabilitation monitoring is coming to a close. I was helping a fuels crew monitor the status of areas that burned 1, 2 and 3 years ago to see how well the BLM’s seeding projects are doing. Now that we’re done with these projects, I’m working with other CLM interns to assess areas that burned 5 years ago, as we should be seeing more diversity and sagebrush seedlings in these older projects. We’ll be generating reports on our findings that will go to the national office, so we’re doing our best to take copious field notes and write out detailed interpretations of what we saw!
Found on one of our last monitoring days – the elusive Hedgehog cactus!
Leaving my Burley fuels crew has been a little sad, as I really enjoyed working with them and getting a glimpse into wildfire management and control, but starting new projects is always exciting! We’ll also be doing some different projects here and there, such as rare plant inventories and botanizing in caves.
Speaking of caves, I recently had the greatest field day of my life, and have been talking about it to anyone who will listen. I joined the Geocorps interns for a day of inventorying invertebrates, bats, archaeological signs and other points of interest in caves. It was an incredibly cool experience. Most of the things we were looking for are pretty small, so we had to scour the walls, ground and ceiling of each cave looking for tiny invertebrates while trying not to bother any bats we found. Some caves had pictographs or old artifacts that we tried not to disturb, and some were quite creepy with how many pitch black chambers they had. My favorite (pictured below) was full of car-sized boulders that we had to scramble over, and the entrance had a stone arch overhead. The mystery of what we would find in each cave definitely made this the most exciting field day I’ve ever had, and I’d love to work in more cave systems in the future.
Stone arch cave entrance!
Green rock at right was the size of a small cabin
I also recently had the privilege of attending a Carex workshop, where sedge experts taught us how to recognize and identify Carex species. It was great to get so much experience with a single genus, but even more awesome to take a break from the sagebrush steppe and do some botanizing up north in subalpine forests and a fen.
Day 3 of the Carex workshop – worked in a fen, definitely the most unique environment and plants I’ve ever seen
Though monitoring has been winding down, I’ve gotten to do some very exciting things lately, and look forward to my last two months here.