6-25-2026

Today we went out to Deshuts National Forest, where we met Marlow Fisher, the district botanist for the Deshute National Forest, for the last 15 years, and manages 200 million acres of forest and the wilderness. Before this, she worked as a firefighter in Cle Elm. She describes Wilderness as having no roads or any kind of machinery. For today, we will be doing a plant survey on the Pumus Moonwart, which is considered federally sensitive and a threatened species. It is kind of like a fern, and is endemic to the Central Oregon area, and is partial to Pumus soil, and there isn't much known about it except it was found in the 1930s by a botanist and didn't gain status until the 90s, and needed to be protected. The population used to be in the 1000s. Not much was known about them, like if they serve some kind of purpose or if it would be ok if they just disappeared, or would the whole ecosystem collapse, it's just kind of there, the only thing they know for sure is it grows in pumus, and grows down below, and higher in elevation. This was kind of the question we were tasked to ponder about as we were doing our surveys: why we think they are here, or what kind of conditions we think they prefer. Marlow did state before we started that their goal is to find their occupancy and presence in this particular area. We did a different method compared to previous years, where they flagged the moonwart sighting, because Marlow forgot the flags, and we resorted to a more traditional method, I guess you can call it that. We essentially lined up horizontally to the area we were going to cover, and walked out going in these zig-zags and shouting the number we saw in our little lane. Jessica was our scribe, and when we got to the other side, we kind of rotated 180° to the other side of one of the people on the end. We spent all morning on this one section; we just went to the other side, and back, it was in this section that I saw my only 8 of the day. In total, though we had spotted 515, I think, and almost all of that was from this first site. At noonish we went and had lunch for about 30is min and sat under a tree. 




Then we drove to a different site, while making a pit stop at these natural springs, near the site we were going to next. It was pretty cool that it had some little obsidian rocks around it, pumice, and cinder. At the site, though, it was a lot smaller than the first one and didn't take as long to cover the area, and there was a little bit here, but there was even less across the road. Because there was some kind of presence Marlow was talking about, making this an area for future surveys. We must have spent like 2 hours here because we also had to collect a soil sample for our project. Gathering it, though, was easy enough because the round was mostly sandy and rocky, and the other measurements were easy enough due to being a fairly open field with not a whole lot of ground cover. When we left, we made a quick stop at Walmart to get stuff for dinner and anything else we needed, and went back to shower up, and mixed our soil so it can settle for tomorrow. 

It's kind of hard to see because it's little, but this is the Pumus Moonwart. 

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