Bryce Canyon

I spent the past few days in a beautiful place- hiking the under the rim trail of Bryce Canyon National Park. We were practically alone on a spectacular trail, the kind of being in a place that makes me wish I had more talent to describe the power of the experience. All of the authors who have inspired me recently, as a writer and as a being, have an incredible sense of place. Edward Abbey, Wendell Barry, Barbara Kingsolver, Tim O'Brien,Terry Tempest Williams, John McPhee, Micheal Pollan, Paul Theroux, and the woman who just wrote The White Mary, which was excellent, to name a short list, all bring the settings of their stories to life. And I am so jealous.

Sometimes I feel like I'll never be able to compete. I'll never be Abbey's lone wolf in the wilderness, or have Barry's emotional connection to the land he has lived and worked his entire life. They have already found the poetry in red rock desert, the intrigue of basin and range fault lines, the magic of the sprouting spring garden, and the adventure of being alone in an unfamiliar land.

I feel the power of the places in my life, from the mundane, staring at the stars through my windshield as I spend yet another night sleeping in the honda, the snowpeak of Mt. Wheeler just illuminated by moonlight, to the extreme, reaching the crest of the ridgeline, 33 miles later, to finally see Bryce Canyon opening out in front of us:The problem is that in all of the places that I find myself, I end up wishing that I had more talent, a greater ability to find truth in the telling, to bring the places I live alive to people who will never wander in the million-dollar wildflower blooms on the Hiko-Stewart fire in Lincoln County Nevada (an essay on this to come, I promise) or climb over the Mormon mountain range carrying several days worth of water to follow fires in the wilderness.

I'm addicted to maps, the names of the mountains and canyons and trails, that all of this nothing out here was actually somewhere to someone, at least long enough to name it. I think that the best I can do, until I hopefully grow up into more talent, is to experience each place that I find myself, as fully as a can. Sometimes, I just take a step back and think, "is this really my life, in this place? this is ridiculous, if only my friends could see me now;" slicing up t-shirts sleeves at 8,000 ft, 15 miles from a trailhead, to make emergency tampons, or lying on my belly, my hair tangled in a spikey-endangered shrub, digging with my bare hands like a dog to claim a piece of it's root's for cloning. These places feel more real, the landscapes that really make up my life.
And of course sharing them sometimes with the people who make up my life as well- Joanna and I on the trail above- once the snow stopped and the sun came out. What a great hike.

Ely Baby!

It's SNOWING in Ely.

This is not surprising, except that it was 80 plus as I was packing up my vegas apartment last week. 4 hours later, the temp had dropped 60 degrees and I had arrived at my new home. And by home, i mean where I pitch my tent. Brrrr....

So, to say my goodbyes to southern nevada- here's the best of my new camera:

Desert Tortoise hanging out in a Krameria erecta.

This awesome Lily who's name I can't remember, and the Jepson is in my car and it's snowing outside....
And the narrows of Lake Mead, receding behind us, as we rushed off to search for endangered and very small Astragalus geyeri....

So goodbye to the Mojave, and the friends I made there, the Great Basin is calling my name!!

For love of sourdough

One of the worst things about moving into your car and tent for the summer is that it's not an ideal habitat for pet sourdough. I discovered this awful truth last march, and now, as I pack up and bid adieu to nightly showers, sheets, and refrigeration, i'm saddest to say goodbye to the yeast community that has sustained me the past few months.

There is hardly anything better than a warm loaf of bread, just out of the oven, spread with a little butter. I love how baking each loaf seems like a little bit of a miracle- you combine the simplest of ingredients- flour, yeast, warm water, salt, maybe some sugar or oil; and work it with your hands until all of the stress and tension has been released from your body into the accepting and forgiving dough. Leave it somewhere warm and it rises, filling the room with that yeasty aroma that smells like home, wherever you are. You punch down the inflated dough, an incredibly satisfying feeling, and leave it to swell again. Finally, you roll your creation into a bread pan, and trust the oven at 350 degrees to finish the work you've started.

From bread, I've learned patience, flexibility, and the absolute superiority of real butter. But, of all the breads I've baked, my sourdough has to be my favorite.

Having a sourdough starter is like having a pet. But a productive pet, you feed it, and it feeds you in return. This is serious sustainability. It saves me money not buying baker's yeast. A community of yeasts and the associated bacteria that feast on the end-products of the yeast's metabolism, my starter usually lives in a yogurt container on the counter, happily doubling in size when I feed it equal parts unbleached flour and water. Every couple days I scoop out a cup or two and bake bread, pizza crusts, pancakes, or on special occasions, donuts.

I made the donuts last weekend, my sourdough's last hurrah. They are dense, cakey spice donuts, the sourdough flavor mixing in with ginger and nutmeg, fried in hot oil and rolled in cinnamon sugar to finish. You don't even want to know how much oil it takes to fry them, but they are so worth it.

Before I truly said good bye to this starter, which has been a loyal friend for several months since I inherited it from a coworker, Lindsey, I began to grow babies. I grew the starter and divided it into lots of mason jars, for Felicia, Briant, Cayenne, and Sarah, along with instructions on the care and feeding of these new pets. Don't stir with a metal spoon. Put it to sleep in the refrigerator if you aren't going to feed or use it for a few days. You can bake almost anything with it.

It's fun to trace the sourdough lineage, to watch the culture that sustained me these past few months, hopefully live on in the kitchens of my friends. The starter I gave up last year died in the hands of my sister, wielding a metal spoon, apparently, but a daughter starter has been living the good life in Albuquerque, providing the weekly bread for my friends Sarah and Alex for over a year now. I like that it creates a sense of community, connections through the strains of yeast we all enjoy.

So I wish all my baby sourdoughs luck, and the new parents great success in raising a healthy, happy community of yeasts. Maybe, when I move out of my tent next fall and into somewhere with an oven (yay!!!), one of them will still have some living sourdough, and I can inherit a daughter of my starter's daughters, and keep my baking full circle.

Why my job is interesting....

A first draft of an essay for my research group's newsletter

Lake Mead National Recreation Area is on of the country’s largest national parks, the largest in the lower 48 states. The 1.5 million acres of park upland encompass the intersection of 3 of north America’s major deserts, the Mojave, the Sonoran, and the Great Basin. The park is home to many rare plant populations. The only population of smoketrees, Psorothamnus spinosus, in Nevada, the northern most community of Palo Verde, Cercidium microphyllum, the endemic and endangered bear poppy, Arctomecon californica to name a few, are surviving and thriving within the National Parks Service protection.

The desert plants’ distribution and abundance are controlled by many factors, but the primary ones in the park seem to be climate and geology. The main climate gradients are intuitive- warmer to the south and cooler to the north; temperatures also decrease with increasing elevation. The aspect of a mountain also affects the local climate; slopes that face south receive more sunlight than those that face north, often favoring different species on opposite slopes.

The controlling affect of local geology is more complicated. As anyone who has taken a scenic drive through the park knows, the rocks around change quite a bit. Volcanic ranges, sedimentary ranges, flat sandy basins, gypsum-rich rolling hills, cobbled desert pavement, black mesas, and red sandstone cliffs. Rooted in place, a plant’s main relationship with its environment is through the soils. Soil properties like mineral and nutrient composition, texture, depth, and ability to retain water have a direct affect on which plants will be able to succeed rooted in that place.

The NRCS has described and mapped more than 50 soil types within the park. Surveying which soil associations support which plant communities is key to understanding the vegetation composition across this diverse landscape.

Within the next 50 years, we expect to see some major changes to our regional climate as a result of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide levels rising in the atmosphere. One to three degree Celsius temperatures increases and more severe, less predicatable precipitation events, leading to an increase in both floods and droughts. To continue in their ideal habitat, scientists expect to see plant and animal communities migrate along climate gradients- seeking cooler conditions northward or up-slopes.

Unfortunately, community migration with changing climate is much more complicated than it sounds. Some plant species with strong dispersal mechanisms will be able to adapt quickly, others will be unable to adjust their range on a meaningful timescale. Species that traditionally cohabitate will find themselves separated; changing community dynamics. Perhaps the biggest challenge at Lake Mead, and in much of the southwest, for ecosystems dealing with the changing climate, is that the soils, rocky-outcrops, and sandy washes will all remain stationary. Species will find that their ideal climate has shifted but their ideal soils have not, creating mismatches that could potentially threaten their survival.

One of the missions of our National Parks is to protect and conserve our natural ecosystems. To figure out the most efficient and effective ways to protect the plant communities of Lake Mead NRA in the changing climate, understanding how soils-climate-species interact the first step for the park. We are currently, on a park-wide scale, to study the plants associated with the different soil types, elevations, slopes, and locations. Collecting this base-line data will help us to see how the communities change and move with a changing climate. With this new information, we can understand where to focus our conservation efforts; to protect this park and it’s ecosystems for the future.

Settled

Okay- my brief moment of spaz is over before it even picked up steam. I talked with the women from Anchorage and she informed me that instead of camping, her crew lives on a small boat on the Gulf of Alaska during their field trips. Considering my incredibly wimpy equilibruim and how sad/sick I can get on a rocking vessel, I decided to decline. I was a little sad, but it made the decision easy. SO I am moving back to Ely. SOON. March 30th we start training. It will still be freezing in Ely on march 30th. So now I have an excuse to buy new wool long underwear...mmm....ibex sale....

YAY job!

Karma

See look what I did- i wrote about all these options yesterday and what happens... everyone calls today, while I was freezing my ass off on a speedboat. Neil with the crew lead job in Ely, the Forest Service in Anchorage wanting to talk about the inventory position. Ahhh.

So the question is (I'm giving myself 48 hours)

Nevada:

Or Anchorage:
The desert: On the down side, it's hot, steep, burn-up, and I'd have to live in my honda again. On the up-side, there's great stargazing, people I like, long weekends to play all over the region, and a crew lead spot.

Or the frozen north: It could be perfect, 65 and sun-shine (alaska 1.0) or freezing rainy and buggy as hell (alaska 2.0). I'd get days off in anchorage, play ultimate, buy food or see movies (oh man- the Bear Tooth...), tons of sunshine, sleeplessness, a chance to work for a new agency, get paid through the fall, learn some new plants, maybe not like the people or the protocol....ahhh...I still need to talk to the PI, before I can really even do this...

(Yes- that is me, in my head-net, exclaiming over our discovery of maybe the world's largest ground-squirell midden. )

So VOTE. VOTE now!!! I might not listen to you, but your input is still welcome! 48 hours on the clock....

It's February Again

So I've been working on the really interesting piece about climate change and Mojave, including the predicted increases in both droughts and floods and how Joshua trees wouldn't be able to adapt to shifting conditions because their seed dispersal mechanisms are adapted to extinct large megafauna like giant desert sloths, but it's not done yet.

So, instead, since it's february, i'm going to indulge in one of my favorite topics: Making way too many plans for what I should do with my life!! (or at least my summer field season). As some of you may remember from last february- I get way too excited about way too many options for summer work and turn into a total spaz. How can the shortest month have the most drama? Last year I applied for like 15 jobs, interviewed for 6, got offered 5, wrote a huge research presentation, fought with statistical analysis software, and fell into all kinds of smooshy romantic feelings for a boy who was way too nice to be my type (at the time, he later turned out to be more of a jerk that I initially gave him credit for). And, in the end, on Leap Day, the last day of the month of spaz, I made the wrong decision, and took the wrong job, and ended up doing boring work in terrible conditions for 3 months (Never again CAKN Botany!)

So this year I am trying to limit my options and make better decisions. Also, only one job has been actually offered to me so far, so this is all just a little bit premature (and therefore more fun, right?) But sometimes you need to prioritize b/c if you have to turn down one position to wait and hear about another one, which you might not get, so you have to have a backup plan.

A. I could go back to Ely. I liked my boss, the schedule, 8 on, 6 off with a great starting location for wilderness trips, great star-gazing, I know most of the plants, decent project protocol, it gets way too hot, I might get a crew lead position which would be good experience and a raise(for now, all I have guaranteed is the tech spot), and I know it won't surprise me and end up miserable. Its starts by April 1st though, which is a little sooner than I meant to leave vegas...

B. I can wait to hear from a forest service position out of Anchorage I've been coveting. Last year they didn't hire any techs b/c everyone came back from the previous season (which is a good sign for a good project- bad for my odds of joining the project) but now i'm way more qualified- that miserable summer in Denali's swamps has to bee good for something, right? I'd love to get back to Anchorage- mix the backcountry work up with a little civilization on my days off.

C. Forest-Service riparian project in Idaho and Montana. If Neil doesn't offer me a crew lead and Anchorage doesn't pan out, this could be pretty great. It's a big project, they wanted to hire me last year, and the applications not due for a few more weeks. I've never been to this area, and I really want to, so it would be a good chance to have a new adventure. I've heard recommendations on the project from friends too. Unfortunately, they only hire at the GS-5, so it's a little pay cut relative to what I would make with options A and B, but it might be worth it to see a new part of the country.

D. So, I sent out a lot of other forest service spot resumes. The website makes it so easy. The pacific northwest network and the northern rockies network, I think. It's hard to remember. I'm not attached to any of them, but it might be cool if they called me up and I learned some details. But otherwise, I'm trying to pretend that those positions don't really exist. Yet. Like I said, I'm keeping it simple this year.

Back to the familiar or out into another land unknown? It's tempting both ways- if last year's unknown hadn't been so unfortunate, I'd probably be more inclined to just jump into deep waters again, but I feel like I've learned to appreciate the usefulness of checking the water first.

Who knows? I guess it really depends on who offers me what these next few weeks. In the end, I just need to make some serious summer money, so I can visit Emily in Thailand and join Clarissa on a southeastasain backpacking adventure in the fall. Thinking about it that way, i don't even feel like a spaz at all.