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Friday the 25th

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Wow, we really got to sleep in today! 7:30 wakeup call felt like the middle of the day. Today we had a really cool activity, we got to go to the US Forest Service Seed Extractory in Bend, Oregon. We got to meet Kayla Herriman, who is the National Seed Specialist for USFS and was our tour guide for the day. Before becoming the National Seed Specialist, she was actually the manager of this facility for 12 years. Kayla is an extremely knowledgeable person, I felt like I was listening to a professor! Her tour was super interesting to me, and I got to learn so much today that there was no way I could’ve written everything down, but I tried my best to get a good bit of it all! To begin, the USFS nursery system has eight facilities. Of those eight facilities, six of them are nurseries and two are seed extractories. Of those six nurseries, the only one that doesn’t also do seed extraction is the nursery in Central Point Oregon because it is so close to the bend facility. The Bend Seed Extracto...
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Thursday the 25th

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Today we had our earliest morning yet, the only other time I’ve woken up before 6am this year was for cherry harvest! We had to get up early to meet with Marlo Fisher, the US Forest Service District Botanist for the Bend-Fort Rock ranger district. She manages around one million acres (wow!!!) of which around 20% is wilderness. She has been doing botany for over 15 years, and originally started out as a wildland firefighter out of Cle Elum. Our job today was to survey for Botrychium Pumicola, known as Pumice Moonwort, but we referred to it as Bopu (combines the 1 st two letters from each scientific name). Bopu is endemic to central Oregon, with some outliers to the north and south by Crater Lake and Mt. Jefferson. Bopu loves the pumice soil found in these areas, which came from the Mt. Mazama and Newberry explosions. We were in the Pine Mountain area to see if there is habitat the Bopu are occupying that scientists do not know about. It took us a while to find our first few, which we n...
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Wednesday the 24th

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Today we met up with Alex Enna at the Lava Lands visitor center before our tour. Alex is the partnership program manager for the Deschutes National Forest. He said a lot of his work is setting up partnerships or securing funding and grants. These partnerships are very valuable as they get a lot of trail maintenance and vegetation management done. With around 2,000 volunteers doing about 50,000 hours of work each year, that is the equivalent of 20 full-time employees! We then got an amazing explanation about the lava flows in the area, the history of the volcanic activity, and a great little geology lesson from Christine Hughes, a park ranger at the visitor center. This helped us understand how the geology of the area changed over time and the major events that have occurred and shaped the landscape. Thanks to DiscoverNW who got us tickets to ride the shuttle to the top of Lava Butte, the hike would’ve been too much! There were absolutely amazing views up here and it was really nice to ...
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Tuesday the 23rd

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Today we had another 6am wake up call and had to pack up camp. Dave Purdon went his separate way, but we were all really thankful for him for coming out and hanging with us for a couple of nights. It was great to talk to him and get some good life advice! After making sure we had everything ready to go, and finished eating breakfast and making lunches, we went to take a soil sample before heading out. It was really cool to see the different layers of soil at this site as they were very clearly separated and even had a lot of mycelium growing throughout. On our drive to our next campsite, we stopped at the Warm Springs museum on the Warm Springs reservation. We were able to meet with Jolene and Louie Pitt, Alysia Aguilar Littleleaf, and Elke Littleleaf. Louie had a great story to tell us about what inspired his life of environmentalism early on. While doing a redd count for work one day he was sitting down taking a break on the bank. When he stood up, the hen that was on the redd near h...
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Monday the 22nd

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Today we had another early morning at 6:00am, no extra hour of sleep for us! We had to make sure we would have plenty of time for our activity today, making beaver dam analogs! I would like to express my gratitude to Yakima Nation fisheries and the Yakima nation for allowing us the opportunity to visit and attempt to restore some of their ancestral lands. I realize the significance and importance of the land we were permitted to try and help improve. The people helping us learn what to do and who are in charge of working on this project are Jeanette Burkhart, who is a watershed planner, Gerard Foley, who is a habitat biologist, and David Lindley, who is a habitat coordinator. We spent the day working in a meadow that swamp creek runs through, and we were attempting to raise the creek to allow the wetland to flood. This will slow down the water as it goes to Cunningham creek and eventually the Klickitat River. This will improve conditions for Steelhead and salmon, and is going to be ver...
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Sunday the 21st

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I think I got eight hours of sleep last night for the first time on the entire trip, it felt amazing. We also had a hot breakfast for the first time since the trip has started, thank you to Monette for making us eggs and bacon! I also decided to help wake myself up by dunking my head in the creek, and the cold water felt so amazing. We then headed out to the White Salmon River to view some really cool sites. We first went to Husum falls, which was awesome. There was so much water churning in the river that it was hard to hear anything when we were right by it. It is extremely impressive to me that just a few years after the removal of the dam that native spring salmon were already jumping past these falls to get to the river above. After Husum falls we went down to Northwestern park to view some of the restoration that is being done to help the different fish species migrating back to this river. There were some ponderosa pine that had been planted and lots of work has been done to hel...
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Saturday the 20th

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Today, Sergio, Dallas and I left a little earlier than the group so that Juan could make it to Pasco in time to get picked up for his family event. It was great to have Juan out here with us and he was really helpful in the field. Especially for all of the soil testing with different kits, he got us comfortable with everything so that over the next week we’ll be able to take soil samples and analyze them ourselves! Hopefully he’ll be able to do some adjunct teaching with Heritage and get us a soil science course. We hung out at the Starbucks in Pasco for a few hours to make sure everyone is able to get up to date on our blogs and data entry. I think we all enjoyed our time in the AC and getting a bit of rest. And thank you to Jessica for getting us all a drink! Salvador Ayala made it to Pasco to take over as our second driver now that Juan is gone, he’s a super friendly guy who I have had the pleasure of hanging out with at my internship down at the WSU IAREC location in Prosser. We al...
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