Day 13 (One last stop)

 Day 13

Wake up today was at 7:30, completely different from the last 12 days. My body was so used to the morning routine that I was up at 5:30, I woke up and took a walk around camp for a little and made a phone call back home. After draining my entire phone battery making a phone call I went back to camp with another 40 minutes before wake-up calls, so I started organizing my luggage, so I had less to do tonight and tomorrow. Over the next 40 minutes I heard everyone waking up before Jessica could even get to us.

I prepped my lunch after food was brought out and then swapped places with Gavin who was still cutting melon and honey dew for breakfast and later. I let him make his lunch and eat breakfast while I drank my coffee and cut the rest of the melon. Today is rumored to be a relaxing tourist day, nothing too labor inducing. We cleared out the SUV’s for a clean up after our tour. And even still we were really good on time. This is the first time we got to sleep in and head out a little later and it felt great everyone looked more recharged and it wasn’t super stressful to get everyone ready and, in the cars, ready to go.

UFS Seed Extractory in Bend Oregon where we met up with Alex Enne again from our trip to the Deschutes National Forest trip to the Lava River Cave, and we met tour guide Kayla Herriman. Kayla is the main seed analysis here at this facility and has been for the last 4 years. She is thee National Seed Specialist, everything goes through her. Kayla reminded us that the career ladder isn't exactly a latter that goes one way, it's more like a web where you get to span out and try new things and those new things lead you to new opportunities, as she started off as a GS2 painting light houses and over time made her way to where she currently stands. There are 8 different facilities of the 8 only 6 have nurseries 2 have seed extractors and 5 do their extractions manually, and the nearby facilities will share their extractor. Although everything we were seeing looked really complicating and techy Kayla reminded us that they are essentially just tree farmers. I don't think of her and her crew as simple tree farmers because of all the technical work I saw and heard but you could say they are tree farmers as they do produce the seeds that they then ship off to other farmers.

After hearing about what we did yesterday, Kayla reminded us that habitat restoration is not just planting native plants back into their habitat but also adding back the rocks and minerals that were once there, and that is why stone nurseries are important. I had no idea stone nurseries were a thing. She also told us that we should check out Timber Wars Podcast and the Salmon Wars Podcast so if you're reading this haven't listened to it yet, I expect/hope that you to also give it a listen along with me.

Kayla then gave us a tour of her awesome facility, told us that they process around 4000 different kinds of seeds for grass, shrubs, trees etc. She showed us all of the different equipment they use for the seed extractions and explained how they work. she also explained that they are currently able sort every see on everything except color, so that would assumedly be size, weight, density, etc. She then took us to the testing room where they test for purity, percent fill, seeds per pound, and percent equilibrium relative humidity or PERH. 





From there we met up Cameron Stauder who is Geneticist, Geneticists focus on seed productivity focus, and seed orchard management. Cameron was showing us how he sorted the seeds from their shells, and that it wasn't always perfectly clean. From there we were told to look into the "Moon Trees and Artemis" it's a project about trees being sent into space, it sounds very interesting and a little close to home because at Wapato High School our robotics program got to partner up with NASA and we got to help develop vacuum sealed chambers that would store apples and keep the fresh for our astronauts that might crave something closer to home, so I am really excited to read more about it when I can. She then told us that during the Apollo mission in the 70's each of the astronauts that went up were allowed to bring one thing with them of their choosing and Stewart Rosa brought a tree sample with him and was able to bring it back intact. From there we unfortunately had to say our goodbyes as Jessica and Monette had things to do. 






We got dropped off to Write our blogs and finish any that were not done yet including todays.



I then got to explore the library...

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