7/15/2019

All of the environmental majors went with Jessica and Monte to visit with the forest ranges in the bend national forest. We met with Marlo F. and Chermane P. they are both botanists for the Bent Rock ranger and forest district. They place they brought us to was pike mountain area habitat type shrub step, off of 216 road. The conditions were partly cloudy and the clouds were increasing, we felt a few drops but nothing serious. They told us that we were going to be counting the number of green tinged paint brushes, or also called the Castilleja Chlorotica which are found only in central Oregon. The reason we were counting these plants was because the Fire management wanted to do a prescribed burn in the area but the problem is that the paint brushes are on the forest service sensitive list and are an endemic species. This means that as it only grows in Oregon it is considered a rare plant, not endangered but it is part of their job to make sure it does not become endangered. Even though this plant grows in a mostly fire resilient area they are not very resilient themselves. They are hemi parasitic, their roots sort of leach off the roots of other plants but don’t kill them, one of the theory’s that they do so poorly in burned areas is because the host plant they live off of dies in the fire and they don’t grow without them. Cherman wants to look at an area they last counted the paint brushes at and see how they recover from fires. This might be a bit difficult as the last counting of the paint brushes was about 25 years ago in 1994, and they counted only 87 plants. This time we counted 414 plants in the area.

After this we went to the Obsidian flows to look at the obsidian rocks. It was interesting to see the rocks that were half obsidian and half pumice. this is due to how many and how big the bubbles were when it cooled. Black glassy obsidian is solid with no bubbles, white pumice is a frothy glass with small bubbles, and dark pumice has big bubbles. You could see that more of the tops of rocks have more pumice, I believe this is because the bubbles rose as it cooled so the top would have more bubbles as it cooled.