Michael Green stands by the rugged Russian Gulch State Park coast at dusk near Mendocino, CA.
NCCC Corps Members were given a splendid work location this third round of service. Team Blue Four will be spending the next eight weeks in Fort Bragg working with the California State Parks District Office in Russian Gulch and with the Noyo Food Forest
Having been USDA Forest Service Class A Sawyer certified, we were able to remove an old, overgrown Christmas tree farm in Silver Falls State Park, Oregon. The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department supplied us with chainsaws and maintenance tools for the job. Oregon is the United State's no. 1 Christmas tree producing state, and in the case of Silver Falls, some of its recently acquired land includes former tree farms.
Sarah Gadomski, Michael Green and Amber Anderson removes fallen Christmas Trees from the area into larger piles to later be removed.
Taylor Burback cuts down a Christmas Tree. We were able to take some back to our temporary residence of the Maud Williamson House.
While at Silver Falls State Park, we took some time to explore the falls that the park is famous for, including the South Falls here, a 93-foot cascade. All waterfalls in the park spill over 15-million-year-old Columbia River basalt.
Scotch Broom (Cytisus scoparious) is a perennial shrub native to western and central Europe and is a noxious species in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Reminiscent of the dreaded hitches of the Nevada Conservation Corps where we pulled the invasive Brassica, or Sahara mustard, most of the time our NCCC team spent working with the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department was spent removing Scotch Broom. Our first taste of this invasive was at a Willamette River tributary, the Luckiamute River.
Scotch Broom was removed from the landscape and placed into a trailer to later be burned.
The NCCC team takes lunch by the Luckiamute River.
Sydney Lawson handles a snake found on the rocks by the river.
Niagara Falls at night.
Visitors ride the Maid of the Mist tour boat at Niagara Falls wearing their provided blue plastic rain coats.
A Maid of the Mist tour boat heads towards the falls.
Onlookers gaze into the evening mist produced by the falls.
NCC members hike to location where they will continue the construction of a trail that connects the Thomas Creek trailhead to the Tahoe Rim Trail.
Dylan Stiegemeier adds wood to a fire at camp.
NCC crews have been working on the Rim to Reno project for months. Because of the now extensive distance between the closest vehicle-accessible location and where we are now working, we are camping back country. Normally, when car camping, we would bring jugs filled with water in our trucks, but as a result of our remote location and the displeasure we experience at the idea of hiking 50-pound water jugs up a mountain four miles, we are instead filtering water from nearby streams. Here, Lucas French maintains the water filters to ensure we're getting a steady availability of water.
NCC crewmembers take a break to eat.
An NCC crewmember slides down a snow-covered area by camp in July. Snow on Mount Rose usually hits a peak at the beginning of April and then starts to melt off. That wasn't the case this year, which has been referred to as the snowiest winter in the last 25 years.
People jump from boulders into Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America. Its surface elevation is 6,225 ft. For comparison back at home, Syracuse, NY has an elevation of 380 ft. Lake Tahoe is also the United States' second deepest lake, the first being Crater Lake, OR.
Visitors at Sand Harbor, on the east coast of Lake Tahoe.
NCC crewmember Trent Lieber jumps into Lake Tahoe.
Beach-goers play in Lake Tahoe in the early evening.
NCC crewmembers in Lake Tahoe. The Sierra Nevada mountain range is the background. The mountains encapsulate the lake. The highest peak in the mountains immediately surrounding Lake Tahoe is Freel Peak at an elevation of 10,891 ft.
The crew commissions single track trail in a recreational area by Pyramid Lake, NV managed by the BLM. We were charged with creating a re-route for OHVs around an area that was recently designated as culturally sensitive. We were apparently not qualified to know what was culturally sensitive about the area, but we gathered that this area, named Spirit Canyon, was of significance to neighboring Native American tribes who perhaps performed rituals in this Canyon. Above, the crew walks through Spirit Canyon.
After work on Thursday, the last day of hitch, we take a dip into Pyramid Lake.
The crew walks over the trail at the end of the day to return to camp for the evening.
A GBI vehicle has no choice but to venture through a flooded road. There were certainly no intact, water-free adjacent roads we could have taken instead.
I'm a Restoration Biologist at Joshua Tree National Park with the Great Basin Institute. I'm from Syracuse, NY where I went to school for Conservation Biology and Recreation Resource and Protected Area Management at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF).
I currently live in Boulder, CO:
Life is pretty cool. I try to document the life I observe with iNaturalist, a citizen science tool that allows users share and map observations of biodiversity across the globe.
Using crowd-sourced data available on iNaturalist, I've learned a lot about the phenological trends and distribution of flora in Joshua Tree NP, assisting with several of our monitoring projects. Come join!
Powered by Squarespace.
