Week 1 - 4

Almost 4 weeks have passed since my internship began and it has flown by! I thought I'd give y'all a little description of what my day to day job is like. Some days my field leader, Dave, and I go out on the river and do a "float" from one river access to another one farther downstream. We also take a look around the river accesses and maintain them regarding accessibility and noxious weeds. At one river access, we discovered a population of the worst weed regarding expulsion - Puncture Vine.

It has these horrible spikey seeds that will stick to anything and go right through your skin.

The population we found has about 30,000 plants at the Ferry Point River Access

We also pulled a couple thousand plants at Sarah Totten Campground and River Access near Horse Creek, CA.

The view from the river access at Sarah Totten

On one of our floats we stumbled upon the largest puncture vine we have found to date. It weighed 20lbs if not more and when we went to pick it up a few days later it had shed about 3/4ths of its weight from drying out.

To give you an idea of how big this plant is, Dave is my height - 5'9 or 5'10.

On that same day, hiked to the beautiful Ukonom Falls.

The view of Ukonom Falls from the trail

Ukonom Falls

Some of the wildlife I've seen: lots of Blacktail Deer, a Fisher, three Mink (in one float!), Common Mergansers, Great Blue Heron, Green Heron, Stellar's Jays, Scrub Jays, Bushtits, Dippers, Black Phoebes, Goldfinches, Acorn Woodpeckers, Bald Eagles, Osprey, a Great Egret, and a lot of salmon are running up the river!  No bears or Mountain Lions yet unfortunately.

There's a surf wave on one of the runs that you can boogie board on. It's a ton of fun. I filmed a video with my GoPro of it and that is soon to come!