Day 12 (Where's Waldo? No, Where's PoBu)

 Day 12

Today wake up time was at 5:45am, I was up at 5 but because I didn’t want to fall back asleep and the only caffeine we had only comes out during breakfast I took a walk by the lake to get my blood flowing. While I was out, I reached out to my family before they went to work to ask how they were and how my cat was doing. After, I reached out to my girlfriend and then some few friends to try and start the day off with a good mind set. When I walked back to camp it was just about 5:45 and so I caught Jessica as she was making morning calls. I was on breakfast duty with Judy, but she was still sleeping and I was wide awake, so I didn’t mind doing it by myself since breakfast is just bringing things out.

After prepping my lunch and having a coffee I started packing my essentials for the day and refilled my hydro pack and hydro flask so that I would have sufficient water for the day. Today we were going to be working in the Deschutes national forest again, but we were in whole different area. There we got to meet Marlow Fisher, a Deschutes National Forest Botanist. She started off by asking us what we thought the wilderness meant, and although I believe it means the outdoors not just outside but away from civilization she believes there’s more to it Marlow said “wilderness means to be away from the traffic, the people, and technology. Marlow has been a Botanist for over 15 years and started off as a Wildland fire fighter before she worked her way to where she is today.

Marlow showed us what a Pumice Moonwart looks like or its scientific name Botrychium Pumicola. Because of the name being a little long to constantly talk about all day. we gave it a nickname to call it for the day “BoPu”, Bo from Botrychium and “Pu” from Pumicola. The plant itself is a tiny little fern, the images I saw online make the plant as if its leaf pattern looks like cilantro but thicker, but from my real-life perspective they looked like time pine trees, but the leaves were very distinct and stood out compared to the other plants. It also says they’re average is around 3-9 inches which must be either a different variant or different climates or terrain make it grow differently because the biggest one we found had 3-inch height and 3-inch leaf span from one side to the other.

We were shown how to do the exercise on PoBu hunting and got in line formation about 20 ft apart from each other and moved south in a zig zag pattern trying to cover as much ground as possible. The goal was to find as many PoBu as we could and to beat last year’s record of 400. We interlapped a few times or accidentally got too close together so Jessica would direct on what direction to move to realign ourselves. In order to accurately keep track of the amount, we would call out how many we found whether it was 1,2,30, etc, then we would wait for Jessica to call it back to confirm she recorded it. The task felt impossible seeing the size of our field, and hearing how big the PoBu’s were, but in no time, people were finding them left and right, and soon so did I. My average PoBu clusters were no more than1-2, but I did find a cluster of 7 and one of 9.

We repeated this process in 3 different fields and would cover a new area each time we walked back to ensure we found as many as possible. The PoBu is a such an interesting little guy, from my observations I notice it absolutely hates roads, and would not grow anywhere close to a road (no less than 40-50 ft from road min), I also noticed it doesn’t really like being too close to big trees or anywhere with too much pine tree debris. It does like sunlight as a big majority of the ones I saw were out in the open by themselves, but they don’t hate the shade as id find small bundles of them hanging out close under the sage bushes. It also seems to like sunlight, but direct intense sun might be a little harmful as we saw some that looked a little burnt.

 After we finished PoBu hunting we begged Marlow for a sample of the area on our knees, full bow type of begging, just kidding she was more than happy to let us test her soil. The soil here was super grainy from the pumice stones let alone the fact that a lot of the soil was pumas stone at one point, it was also full of tiny rocks, but I am excited to see what kind of data we’ll pull. All data is good data because it tells us something, even if it’s not the exact result you were looking for.

After we collected our sample and on-site data, we visited the Deschutes Public Library. This place was awesome, Monette said it was new and it definitely looks it. it had a café on the entrance floor and multiple different rooms for other things. We were there for blogs, so I didn’t really get explore asides from what was in eyesight while I uploaded blogs. But I hear we’re going to be there for a few hours tomorrow so that’s exciting. After our 30 minutes to upload what we could we went to Walmart to get people some extra clothes because some people were running low on essentials. Luckily for me I packed a little extra, so I was fine, but I did go buy myself a few cup ramens cause that’s my favorite meal even at home, and I thought I deserved it, so I bought 4 😈.

After Walmart we made our way to the showers as we had to be there before 6. Me and Judy went first along with Monette so that we could get dinner ready, we were having quesadillas today. We prepped the chicken, but unfortunately, we didn’t have the tortillas, so we had to wait for them to arrive since they were in car a (Sal’s car). When they arrived, we had the chicken and condiments ready for them, we just needed the tortillas to make the quesadillas. Now we had the tortillas we started lining people up for dinner. While we finished getting everyone’s food done Gavin aka The Goat prepped our samples for tomorrow and so after dinner we were done.

Jessica, Lovey, and Judy all made cupcakes (strawberry with chocolate chips inside). They were delicious but unfortunately, I was full from dinner and snacking on so many lichees. We enjoyed a nice campfire before the night ended, chatted for a while and then got ready to call it a night but not before putting the fire out. Because of my luck, of course it started raining after we put the fire out… we could’ve saved time and water but its okay its better to be safe than sorry.