Our summer program here at SSISC is flying by, and we would like to welcome you to our fourth “A Day in the Life Of…” blog post, featuring our Field Crew worker, Erin.
I can’t believe we are already halfway through the summer! Time flies when you are having fun exploring the Sea to Sky Corridor and learning lots about plants! This week was a mix of different sites from Squamish all the way to Pemberton.
View from the top of Chance Creek FSR
I started off the week by treating a Giant Hogweed plant for the first time. This particular plant was massive, standing over 2 meters tall, and pretty menacing considering its sap is phototoxic. This means that it causes your skin to blister when exposed to sunlight. However, it is safe to eat if you’re brave enough! It’s safe to say the home owner was pretty happy we could treat it for them. Other sites this week included mechanically treating Himalayan and Cutleaf Blackberry in the Squamish Estuary and conducting inventories of high priority invasive plants on various Squamish streets.
For a couple days this week we continued surveying and treating private sites in Whistler and Pemberton. These sites have been amazing to do because they are all pretty remote and only accessible by forest service roads. They are also gorgeous and have stunning views! I would have never seen these places if I wasn’t working for SSISC, so I’m pretty grateful to be able to see these beautiful places in the corridor. Also, since these sites are in pretty high elevation, I have learnt a lot about different local sub-alpine plants!
Our week ended with seeing a cute black bear youngster eating raspberries along one of the forest service roads! I am excited to see what the next half of the summer has in store!
We would like to give a big thank you to the Community Foundation of Whistler for its grant that is allowing Erin to be employed by SSISC all summer long.
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