Outstanding Orchids! (and some other plants too!)

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The Rocky Mountain Front

This month has been filled to the brim with new plants and new places. Since the last blog post Sky and I have kinda settled into the position and have been getting into a groove. Most days we end up going to the Helena side of the forest so we can get plants in a large area which means we’ve been doing A LOT of driving, but hey I get to listen to my music more, so that’s a plus!

Our month started with us going to the Rocky Mountain Front to meet up with the head botanist in the Helena office to help look for a rare orchid that should be in the area. However, in order to get to the right spot we had to go off-trail and really get into the thicker parts of the forest. It was some of the most fun I had on the job! It felt like I was really exploring the forest that I’m stationed in and it made every plant that we found even more exciting than usual. In the end we were able to find the orchid we were looking for along with some other ones!

Galiarus rotundfolia (Small Round-Leaved Orchid) was the orchid we were looking for. It likes to grow in damp areas and can be easily confused with Twinflower when they aren’t in bloom.
Cypripedium montanum (Mountain Lady’s Slipper) was also growing near the Small Round-Leaved Orchid! This was the first time I’ve seen this one!
And my personal favorite: Corallorhiza striata (Striped Coralroot). This orchid gets it’s sugars from the mycelium in the ground through mycoheterotrophy! I hope that I get to see more of this one in the future.

The week after our trip with Nate we spent some time helping out the trails crew and sprayed some weeds around some campgrounds. Wasn’t my favorite work to do (especially since we ended up spraying a lot of Ox-eyed Daisies, which I didn’t know were invasive until then), but we had a cookout for lunch so it wasn’t all too bad!

The rest of the month was spent doing our usual survey work and seed collections. It’s been interesting seeing how our populations change throughout the season and then seeing how these plants spread their seeds. This job has made me so much more conscious of the different stages of a plants life and how differences in climate can affect the timing of when it’s seeds are released. The higher temperatures in Helena along with the forest fires in the area has made it so many of the plants in that part of the forest are much farther along than the ones that we see closer to the ranger station. This has sometimes been a source of some frustrations since it narrows down the already short window for collecting from some species, but it has also allowed us to collect from some species sooner than we would be able to if we just stayed close to the ranger station.

Overall it has been another good month of my time in Montana, and I’m excited to see what this next month brings!