BLM rehabilitation (Oct29-Nov1)
On Monday (11-5), we will be going to the Gold Butte backcountry for 8 days to do rehabilitation for the 24K acre fire that occurred sometime in the last 2 years. We’re camping out there; no fancy-schmancy campground with pit toilets and a 1/4 mile hike to running water next week!
This week (Mon – Thurs), we rehabilitated about 900 acres in Red Rock Canyon National Preservation Conservation area. The USGS partnered with the BLM to create an experiment/study to determine the best method for re-establishing native plants which can take up to 50 – 2000 (estimated based on past data) years to take stock again after a fire (black brush in particular), so we had 8 varieties of planting tasks.
Since the wild burros and horses will munch the plants to nothing if given the chance, as will the jack rabbits, kangaroo rats, desert tortoises, and other critters, we caged the little guys after planting them. On Monday, the BLM/USGS partners announced the cages were on their way from Arkansas and should arrive shortly. Needless to say, they arrived Thursday morning. Damn Arkansonians! =) Between Mon and Thurs, the partners built small screen tents from scrap screen that were very sharp on the edges for us to put around the seedlings.
The BLM fire department helped us today by providing a truck and water hose up to each plot so that we didn’t have to trek with watering cans (or water cannons, as I have consistently called them today for an unknown reason except perhaps exhaustion). I thought of my cousin Will a lot on Thursday since he works for the fire/rescue department up near Lake Arrowhead in CA and was working against the fires up there last week.
Since Red Rocks is in such a public eye, there was a Las Vegas Review Journal reporter out there with us on Tuesday and a TV crew on Wednesday. The reporter’s father played football for Illinois Wesleyan! Anyway, there’s a picture of a coworker and me planting a plant on the front page of the B section. (The photog missed the plant! Imagine that.) The article is good (except for him explaining that one of the plants we planted, ephedra, is used in meth production. Last thing we want is koo-koos running around pulling up our plants…)
As if it wasn’t stressful enough on my humidity-loving body to adjust to 3-15% humidity! I love planting and gardening, and access to water, but my hands….! Planting…mix water with dirt to make mud. Get hands wet. Hands dry in the wind and the soil. Hands get wet. Hands air dry…4 days of that, and 8 next week… Think of a very fine sandpaper and run it across your face, your arms, and try to put on clothes….Ick! The NCC issued us personal protection equipment (PPE): a helmet, safety glasses, and gloves. I don’t wear the gloves at all when planting; most of my crewmembers put them on after the water is done to push dry dirt onto the plant and create burms to hold the water. That’s too labourious in my mind; I just push the dirt with my hands. Needless to say, in the desert when a cactus dies, it returns to the soil and its spines blend in with the soil.
Heh, I just found the story online so y’all could read it, and it had a correction that was published: ephedra was found in a 2001 study to not be related to meth production. hee hee
http://www.lvrj.com/news/10911281.html (no longer available) [7 May 2008 I found the article on Scribd.]
Coyotes that ran around our campsite at night… they ran with one of the supervisor’s boots about 100 feet as he found when he went for it in the morning, and they were cavorting around my supervisor’s and a team member’s tent area at night. So far I haven’t seen any snakes or scorpions. Perhaps next week.
