Lately, we really haven’t given our trails crew enough love on these pages, but they continue to do great work building and restoring trails throughout Nevada and the West. These include the Flume Trail project in Incline Village, the 5th Street project close to Prison Hill in Carson City, the Spooner Lake Trail project in Tahoe, Great Basin National Park…

The Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) is a tough fish, able to survive in the waters of a single spring in Ash Meadows National Refuge. . These waters average 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit and are characterized by low dissolved oxygen and limited food sources. Water pumping in the late 1960s and 1970s, however, dropped water levels, threatening to destroy the shallow…

Nature, they say, offers solace and beauty. But when our media team offered a theme of “SPOOKY!” for the October photo contest, our field personnel brought out the darker side of our environment. The winner is AmeriCorps member Joshua Schuster who submitted the above picture of his archaeology crew in the Spring Mountains. Enjoy these other submissions, eerie, startling, atmospheric……

In September 2019, GBI entered into an agreement with the National Park Service to deploy a Research Associate to conduct historical interpretation and engage with various communities, including Japanese Americans and Tribal peoples, at Manzanar National Historic Site. Manzanar is, of course, best known as a Japanese American internment site during World War II. This project aims to increase understanding…

From September 29th to October 3rd, Reno, NV played host to the first joint conference of The Wildlife Society and American Fisheries Society. Spread out between the Reno Convention Center and several area hotels, this was the largest gathering of fish and wildlife professionals ever. Indeed, the conference drew around 4,400 participants. As conference organizers explain, this conference provides “[u]nprecedented…

Choosing a winner of our monthly photo contest is an unenviable task, especially when we get as many superb entries as we did in September.  Nevertheless, a winner there is. This month it’s AmeriCorps member, Katie Reisinger. Katie is on a Whitebark Pine Monitoring crew that serves in back-country areas in the Sierra Nevada. In this photo, above, you can…

Yet again, we’ve received a bunch of great submissions to the GBI photo/media contest, including the winner displayed at the top of this page. This beautiful night sky photo was submitted by Alessandra Puig-Santana, Spanish Language Social Media Technician at Joshua Tree National Park. (Learn more about Alessandra’s work HERE.) Below you’ll find the August finalists, which we opened up…

GBI is proud to present our first bilingual Field Update. Our thanks to Socorro Cardoso for providing the Spanish translation located below. Socorro Cardoso’s experiences with our national parks speak volumes: “I am a Latina woman who grew up in a low socioeconomic household in Los Angeles. I never visited a national park until finally, in my junior year of…

A legacy of the fevered search for gold in the West, there are over 300 abandoned mines in Joshua Tree National Park, so many that they have become an indelible part of the park’s landscape. Mine shafts have come to serve as wildlife habitats, especially for bats, and they provide a good source for cultural resources studies. But they also…

In July, we received a bunch of great submissions for our media contest. Below is just a sampling of what our field personnel were able to capture, including the winning entry, video shot by Cecilia Huizar. “I feel lucky to say that this is what we get to do every morning,” says Cecilia. “Here is my crew lead, Liz (Elizabeth…