another week in the desert

well it's late friday night/early saturday morning, and i of course left my notebook with all my great thoughts in it back in the trailer, so it will have to wait till tomorrow. how's everyone doing? my week was a really long one. we usually work mon-thurs, and get back late on thurs, but this week we had too much to do and decided to come back on friday. it made for a long week and a short weekend. we don't get overtime pay, we get comp time which doesn't seem as good although it means i can take more time off, if i ever get a chance to take time off, but if i don't, all the comp time i earn gets paid as regular time, which *isn't* as good as overtime pay. plus this week was physically (hot) and emotionally (stress) taxing. i'm tired but want to get a few things done before bed. the days off are definitely not long enough!

i'm dinking around, uploading my photos to yahoo photos so my folks can see what i've been up to the last 2 months. and anyone else, really. i am creating about 3 new albums, including:

nevada and beyond - which covers my departure from reno and a bunch of other photos of my new environment and my coworkers

great basin national park - self explanatory

south ruby mountains - i took a bunch of really cool photos of the sunset(s) up there

so that's that, more posting tomorrow, hopefully. please comment and let me know if you'd like the link to the photos, since i can't possibly post them all here!

xoxo
me '99 :)

just another day in the desert

you know, i had a lot of things i wanted to write in here, but got sidetracked through the day. did get around to grocery shopping and playing in the rain. i'm now packed and ready for another week in the desert, and much to everyone's dismay, i have no new photos for this week, since i was so stressed out last week. last week we participated in what is playfully known as the dog and pony show, which basically meant my crew was on display one day for a whole bunch of other researchers to observe what we do. situation being what it was didn't turn out to be ideal for most of us on the crew, one person in particular was really messing with the attitude of the entire group. hopefully that's all resolved now and we can get back to work.

we should have our full crew of 8 people back tomorrow, for our second adventure in the south ruby mountains. hopefully we won't get anymore flat tires. everyone cross their fingers we don't get stranded somewhere.

let me pose a question:

what's the biggest adventure you've ever been on? where did you go and why was it an adventure? looking forward to hearing from y'all! (no i'm not southern, just influenced by one of my roommates who is from texas originally).

~hugs kisses and mushy stuff~

a few random thoughts from a random place

of course now that i sit down to write i can't think of any of my good thoughts i had last week and of course i don't have my little notebook that i write the thoughts in. so maybe next week's thoughts will be better.

anyway there is a fire burning in the hills just beyond the town of ely NV, and the smoke is rising up in such a way to make the sunset look very beautiful.

went hiking over the weekend with my coworkers and we had a nice time at great basin national park. even got some more post cards so i can't blame no media on my lack of letter writing to everyone! and, my posting got moved to sunday because, well, i'm sure i was busy on friday.

last night a few of us went out to get a drink to celebrate jane's birthday. the bars in ely on saturday night were deader than dead (approx 6 people at 1130pm). i wanted to dance. instead, we watched the eagles "hell freezes over" tour on the big screen (played on a dvd i guess). so much for a high energy party night. but i did learn a bit more about the eagles, things like i didn't know don henley was the drummer! how had i gone all these years not noticing this? after the drinks we came home and sat on the porch and looked up at the stars. i got out my star charts and started naming off constellations. we also talked about scottish vs irish and i did a little jigging, and ted asked me where i learned to do all these dances. you know, i guess i just picked them up randomly, wherever i've been. i've lived in a bunch of places so i've had the opportunity to be exposed to lots of kinds of dancing, not just bumping and grinding...but what i would really like to do here in ely is dance a bit and there just isn't those kinds of opportunities. *shrug*

anyway here's a few photos from the week.

the one on the left is when we just started out hiking for the day, the one on the right is a fallen tree upon the entrance to lake teresa.


some pretty flowers along the trail. the one on the left actually kind of smelled like skunk.


some of the rocks we climbed over were really interesting. then we reached the bristlecone pine area where we saw bristlecone pine, limber pine (not pictured), and englemann spruce.




then we trekked on up to the glacier (that's right i said glacier) where there was still snow in the middle of july on a hot day. we didn't believe it till we stood in/on it ourselves.



more tree photos and another view of the lake



looking forward to the next week...we head out to a place called the south ruby mountains, which is supposed to be very beautiful and very dense with plants. oh goodie! catch you next week.

easter in oregon

well i spent my first easter out of state (meaning the one i was living in at any given time) . and it was a good time. i met up with my friend mike from corvallis, and we met up with stan from blogger world. went hiking at angel's rest just east of portland, and had a very nice day - it didn't rain till we were descending from the 'peak'. we didn't see any angel's resting per se, but there was speculation on that...

...now it's months later than the actual original write date of this entry. i'd meant to post some photos, but can't seem to find the ones i took with my digital camera currently. instead, i'll just write that since we met, stan decided he doesn't want to talk to me anymore, which i don't fully understand, unless i did or said something completely offensive. in which case, i humbly apologize because i didn't know i did it.

anyway if i do ever find those photos they will be posted! till then, back to the desert. catch you all on friday...

it's ely time

first, the photos it took me forever to upload:

interesting sunset shots from the drive back after the first week of camping:

some trees and flowers we've seen either from our plots or in our plots
(ok and one fun cloud photo):

went for a train ride on the historic ely train that makes regular trips to and fro, but not actually dropping people off anywhere but ely, as well as me cutting trail on national trails day sponsored by the USFS (all the tools you can use in a day!), and some other flower photos (oh yeah, ps, i cut my hair off and donated it to locks of love before i moved here, so now i have what i like to refer to as a bowl cut :D ):





the high desert is really a beautiful place. i've been at 6500 feet or higher for the past 6 weeks (aside from my july 4th trip to corvallis oregon) and have been working for the US Forest Service doing research on the sagebrush ecosystem and invasive species such as pinyon pine and cheatgrass. every day for work we drive (the first set of plots was 1/2 hour from ely, the second set is about 3 hours away) or hike out (sometimes a mile) to our field plots, where after a flurry of gps'ing, pulling measuring tapes, hammering in stakes and unloading gear, we're ready for another exciting adventure. every day - or at least every week - we see some new plant we didn't see at a previous plot. many times these new plants are grasses which doesn't totally thrill me because one grass can look like another if it's in the shade or different if it's in the sun, or on a north or south facing slope, or, or, or...that's my biggest challenge. but the plants are new and interesting and i think i've learned around 50 new plants in the past month and a half.

we measure 9+ parameters at each site. they include:

1. fuel load - how much and what size dead wood is laying across our transects
2. line point - what plants are present at this site along the transects
3. gaps - how much space is there between live plants along the transects
4. herbaceous density - how many of each short grass, tall grass, forb, or other short non-woody plant is present along the transects
5. shrubs - how many small and how many big shrubs are located along the transects, and how big are they anyway?
6. herbaceous fuel load - for this one we cut one transect line of grasses and forbs (read: we sit on the ground and use clippers to give the desert a little hair cut), and collect all herbaceous litter, leaving all woody species and woody litter. sometimes we collect soil.
7. tree litter and duff - how much litter is present under the trees in this plot? we literally get "into" the trees to find out. we also collect soil.
8. tree size and density - what trees are present in this plot, and just how big are they?
9. overall species list - there may be plants we missed along the transects, so the crew leader walks around the plot taking an overall list of what species are present at each plot.

sounds like a cake walk right? it takes us about 2-3 hours to do a given plot, including set up and take down, and sometimes longer if there are a ton of trees to measure. overall i really like the work. my crew is split into 2 teams. i work with 3 other people and the other team has 4 people, and the crew leader splits his time between both groups to help out. in a given day, between our 2 teams, we generally get 4-5 plots done, and get 1-2 more set up for the next day. each site we go to has between 15-20 plots, and there are 3 types of plots at each site...well it's a lot of sampling, i'll leave it at that!

the living situation is a little interesting. i live on the ely ranger district headquarters property, in a double wide trailer with 3 bedrooms. i have a roommate, her name is jane. we are very compatible as roommates. the other 2 rooms have 4 guys: robert, james, ted, and micah. although we found out today that james is quitting and taking another job in montana in his field of study so good for him. the other people that work with us but don't live with us are nathan and eric. travis is the crew leader and lives with his wife here in ely. robin is the project supervisor and actually lives in reno, but comes out to help us as often as he can.

when we're not living in the quarters, we spend our time camping. which amounts to about 4 nights a week. so i spend monday, tuesday, wednesday, and thursday working and camping. sometimes we come home thursday night, but it seems like we're probably going to start coming home friday morning soon. it's hard to say just yet because we've been working so hard that we've gotten to come home thursday nights. we generally work 4 ten hour days, although usually we work more like 12 hour days. let me tell you, coming home friday and taking a hot shower, and going to the post office are two of the most looked forward to events of the week! so, if anyone feels like sending me some mail, i think i put the address on the previous post but just in case, here it is again:

kristen falk
general delivery
ely NV 89301

i'm here until at least the end of september so i can always use a smile in the mail box.

i think that's about it for now, i tried to post some more photos but the computer is acting weird. we'll see what i can do. till then, miss you all and hope all is well. please write, it's the highlight of my week, hands down.

peace, love, and turtles!!