{"id":32723,"date":"2013-08-20T11:45:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-20T18:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev-clm-blog.pantheonsite.io\/?p=32723"},"modified":"2013-08-20T11:45:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-20T18:45:00","slug":"hills-hills-and-more-hills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/?p=32723","title":{"rendered":"Hills, hills, and more hills"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m actually nearing the end of my internship now and I can’t believe how fast time has gone.\u00a0 In all honesty, I will be relieved to leave the desert but I will definitely miss all the cool rock formations, the smell of sagebrush, and the nice roads for road cycling.\u00a0 This week has been a particularly rough week of hiking.\u00a0 We were first working in Baker City doing vegetative monitoring in an ACEC at Hunt Mountain and later in the week, we surveyed for Pyrrocoma radiata, an aster.\u00a0 Both jobs required walking along some serious slopes (probably up to 60 – 70%).\u00a0 I now know that just because something looks inaccessible doesn’t mean that it is.<\/p>\n

Despite the rough hiking, working at Hunt Mountain near Baker City has been my favorite part of the whole summer.\u00a0 Our first trip there involved conducting white bark pine blister rust surveys with several different forest service employees.\u00a0 I was incredibly happy to be working with trees again and found the lesson on tree diseases to be really interesting.\u00a0 The level at which each individual tree was infected varied greatly and sometimes making the diagnosis was much more difficult than you would expect.\u00a0 The trees living on these slopes were already under a great deal of stress from the climate that they had to endure on a regular basis, so few looked extremely healthy to begin with.\u00a0 However, some showed symptoms (rough bark, animal chew, spores, tar, and swelling) much more than others.<\/p>\n

The spores need moisture in the air to lead a successful infection.\u00a0 Wet, cool conditions are perfect.\u00a0 So the warming, drying trend of climate change might actually be good for slowing blister rust spread?\u00a0 Wrong.\u00a0 According to the forest service employees, Baker City and the surrounding area might be a rare place that actually experiences greater precipitation with climate change.\u00a0 Bad news for the white bark pines.\u00a0 I am very interested in this phenomenon and am considering studying it through a PhD program, which I hope to begin next year.<\/p>\n

A quick update on SOS: we have made 11 collections so far and we are coming very close to the end of the seed season.\u00a0 We only have one more population that we expect to collect from.\u00a0 Despite having had a few disappointments (species we thought we’d be able to collect that didn’t pan out), we think that we have done pretty well.\u00a0 Higher elevation areas have turned out to be the saving grace for this year’s drought.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I think the next time I post, it will be for my final reflection!<\/p>\n

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We ran into this female and young bighorned sheep along the side of the road.<\/p>\n

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A view from along some really steep slopes we were working on near Rye Valley, OR.<\/p>\n
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The spectacular view from Hunt Mountain.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m actually nearing the end of my internship now and I can’t believe how fast time has gone.\u00a0 In all honesty, I will be relieved to leave the desert but I will definitely miss all the cool rock formations, the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1854,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32723"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1854"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32723"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33141,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32723\/revisions\/33141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}