POBR 2024 ilenegoudy

Day 6: June 21, 2024           The class was scheduled to wake up at 6:30am. We completed our assigned chores. We all loaded up and met up with the Deschutes National Forest Botanist—Marla Fisher. Fisher’s project focuses on a rare plant survey for the plant species pumice moonwart, Botrychium pumicola (BOPU). Fisher also calls this project BOPU (pictured in figure 1) for short. We started out with introductions and then started with a meaningful question. The question was, “what does the natural world mean to you?” It was nice hearing the answers from everyone.            Fisher briefly explained how pumice moonwart was a native plant species within the volcanic ash/rock and how it the plant species is declining. The project site was located at two different spots at the Bend Fort Rock in the Deschutes National Forest. The location is specifically in the shrub steppe habitat. Also note, that the soil/rock type there was ...

Day 5 June 20, 2024   The class was scheduled to wake up at 6:00am but no one started moving around until 6:30am. However, I waken up by the bird singing away at 5am. Early birds! Once everyone started moving around, we all had our breakfast and coffee. Then we jumped right into lab work at 7:30am. We took our water samples out for bacteria isolation. We took swaps from each water sample (Birdcreek, Snow plow creek, and Blockhouse creek) from the cultivated tubes and put them in agar plates to incubate for another 24-28hours.  After we finished up with our labs, we met up with the US Forest Service- Deschutes National Forest partners (pictured in figure 1). Partners included was Cynthia Anderson (assistant program manger), Alex Enna  (partnership management-fire management), and then Sophia zoll (Ameri core conservation educator) was our tour guide for the first trip. Our first trip into Lava land was in the Lava River Cave (pictured in figure 2). The lava river cave is w...

  Day 4: June 19, 2024 Travel day:  We were scheduled to wake up around 5:30am. Completed our assigned duties and then started packing up camp. We left the Bird Creek Campground by 7:30am. Then we went to the Glenwood General store to upload our blogs. We hit the road around 9am. Once we crossed the river, we stopped off at the gas station to wait for the other car to catch up to us. After that, we stopped off at Safeway in Madras, Oregon for gas and to stretch. Then we stopped off at Redmond, Oregon to get gas. Then we stopped off at Safeway in Bend, Oregon to stock up on groceries. During our last stretch of the day, we got to see the Sisters and Mt. Bachelor. It was so beautiful. We finally arrived at Crane Prairie Campground (figure 1) around 4pm.   Figure 1: The view of the three sisters from the Crane Prairie Campground.

  Figure 3: Virginia pulled out a selfie on our trip to Snow Plow Creek. 🌲⛰ Firgure 4: Virginia and I on our trip to the field. 😃