Around the Office, Summer 2010

It’s been a wet and cold spring in Montana, delaying runoff, messing with vegetable gardens and  hopefully helping make up for the very dry winter we had. But wet weather doesn’t stop the spring/summer field season from starting, and we’ve got folks all over Montana working on monitoring and data collection…

Welcome!

We’d like to welcome four different field techs we’ve hired on project contracts for the summer. For starters, Adam Bender is returning to continue our road condition inventory work with the Lolo National Forest this summer. He is joined by Graham Byrd, who cut his teeth inventorying road problems in northern California – the epicenter of the road reclamation field. We couldn’t have hired a more experienced field crew to implement inventory work, which is an expansion of similar work we did last summer. And, in our never-ending quest to continue finding projects for jack-of-all-trades Greg Peters, we’ve hired him on a contract to conduct field monitoring of Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative projects in Montana and Northern Idaho, funded with a challenge grant from the National Forest Foundation.

With thanks to the Dillon Patagonia store, we’re happy to welcome intern Ryan Applegate, who will be helping to conduct ORV monitoring for us in the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest part time from July through October. And Ryan’s not the only one who will be conducting monitoring on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge this summer. Thanks to a grant from The Wilderness Society’s Recreation Planning Program we will also be working with a local horse packer, which enables us to cover more ground than in previous years.

In addition to these great field staff, we’ve also hired a legal intern, Dave Whisenand, from University of Montana Law School to help us with important legal research for the coming year. Dave will be working with both Sarah Peters and Adam Rissien on his research. Welcome aboard to all of our new interns and summer field techs!

Thanks

This work wouldn’t be possible without financial support from our members and foundations. Thanks to all of you who have donated in the last few months – especially our new members through the Combined Federal Campaign and Montana Shares. Special thanks to the Cinnabar and Mountaineers Foundations, and a big thank you to Northwest Fund for the Environment and Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative for grants to support our restoration work!