Catching Up

Hello again,

It has been a while since posting here. Weekly duties are getting harder and harder to keep up with. We have much to report. Meredith came for a site visit and we ended up taking her to the North Rim because the vegetation department was having a meeting over there. The North Rim was beautiful, we went to the meeting and did a day of maintenence around the admin building. We pulled invasives, planted some salvaged plants, and watered them in. We met with Meredith and gave our mid-season presentation to her at our campsite. It was a good week, nice to be out of project sites and working on something different. After our north rim visit, we decided to turn our mid-season presentation into a public presentation. Camie made a flyer to post in various places around the park to let the public know. It was beautifully illustrated with oil pastels. Christine and Camie decided to make a video for their portion and it turned out great, it was very professionally done. We had several techincal issues that we gracefully overcame with a little persistence. We had 10 attendees, mostly some friends from the interpretation department and some veg people.

I have compiled a rough estimate of some of the work we have completed from March-June at GCVC.

3,876 plants in the ground (including two weeks of 30 SCA spring break volunteers helping) in planting sites P5, P6, P9, P11, and P10
362 plants salvaged from the dump (mostly globe mallow) + 16 plants salvaged from the new parking lot area plus a lot of duff salvaged for future plantings
59,538 invasives pulled from restorations sites at GCVC
14 volunteer groups worked with - mostly ACE teams and GCY groups

Those numbers don't include the majority of our work: watering. Our watering hours are usually two full 10 hour days per week and sometimes 3 days depending on how dry it is.

The irrigation system seems to be in working order now... for the most part. Some areas are getting repairs done, some of the irrigation is underground and when we plant things, go figure, we hit underground pipes sometimes. I think the next contractor to put in irrigation here is doing it completely underground... glup. Any suggestions on how to not hit the lines and break our equipment?

We did a large planting with almost everybody in the vegetation department at the end of July after a big rain. It was great to feel supported by the staff and volunteers here. They did a great job, and our site looks wonderful. So we finished planting P10, B10, and B11 (B means basin) and have started caging it.

With the help of GCT and ACE volunteers we started planting P7 this past week. Already we have close to 1,000 plants in that site with a few hundred to go. Not to mention caging, seeding, duffing, and invasive pulling. I took some pre-planting pictures of P7 and they are below (post-invasive removal). I will post the post-planting pictures when we are done.

The last couple weeks we have also been focusing on getting high priority invasives out of our sites, namely russian thistle or tumbleweed. Over 1500 russian thistle pulled... ugh. They are everywhere.

Special Note: The endemic species present in part of our site: Tusayan Flameflower is blooming right now. Last year they transplanted some of it to an island in one of our parking lots and it seems to have survived to bloom again!

The team is now planning the plantings around the new bathrooms... totally glamorous. It is definately high visibility because everyone who comes to the grand canyon will be using these state of the art bathrooms just seconds away from the rim. We have some girls on the team who are interested in landscaping and are excited about the project. Jan Busco usually does the plans for us, but this time we will make the plans and hopefully we can get the plants in the ground before they all leave otherwise the next team will get to plant it.

The rains have given us a much needed rest from watering. We have been able to focus on planting, caging, etc. And they bring in the cooler temperatures for the afternoons which is really nice.

The "Orange Grove" is getting moved out and planted finally!!! For those who aren't regular subscribers to our postings, the orange grove is about 30 salvaged pinyon and juniper trees in boxes that have been waiting to get in the ground since last fall. Christine has been their caretaker for the past few months and has monitored them for bark beetle, watered, and blessed them. They are healthy and finally going in the ground.

Today the construction crew started demolition on the Pinyon-Juniper stand that is to become a parking lot... it was sad to see. Some of those trees were over 100 probably even 200 years old. But we move on, and plant even more.

Well that is all for now. More soon hopefully.

Peace,
Molly