Week 9 in Review:

As usual, I went into base this week and worked alongside other interns and now paid staff to help complete and ongoing Fish and Wildlife projects. This week, I was assigned to work with Gina, an Evergreen grad, and now paid staff member who does a variety of projects through the department. As of recently, she has strictly been on timber sales. Usually when people start joking about projects and lead you on your way with a, “have fun” you know your project is going to be everything but fun. I was prepared for thick bushes we would be walking through in the woods, but also was very hopeful we would be walking along trimmed back trails- which of course, we didn’t. When we drove up to the site, the first thing that caught my eye was stinging nettle as tall as me. I wasn’t sure what to expect but was not expecting to be walking through nettles.
Thankfully, most of the trip was through ferns, salal (which is surprisingly hard to fight off and walk through because it wraps around your legs), traveling over and under fallen logs, and trying to avoid all the mossy spots in the woods when you could see them, because it usually meant you would be sinking into a hole a foot or two deep. I went into the day a little bit fearful, but overall was incredibly grateful it wasn’t raining or incredibly hot. We went through a lot of elevation changes that day, and it felt like we had been walking through the woods for endless hours, but I was happy to have a great partner for this trip, who knew a lot about the subject, and also helped refresh me on names of the native plants as we saw them.
Timber Sales was challenging because you need to stop every assigned spacing of meters (usually 300-500) and do bird calls. The entire time though, the people on timber sales need to be on the look out for raptor nests in the tree canopies, watching out for noxious weeds/invasive species, keep a sense of direction with the GPS, try not to fall too far off trail, all while figuring out the best way to get through the brush.
I left that day with half a dozen bruises from falling into holes and banging my knees on fallen trees I couldn’t see when the brush was so thick, but I also ended my day feeling a successful type of exhausted, and felt incredibly accomplished, leaving without any more serious injuries, and no back pain.