Day nine: Today I woke up at 6:00 AM, and helped get breakfast prepared. Then I packed my lunch, we departed at 7:30, and took a two hour drive, to sand springs. We met up with Marlow Fisher, she is a Botanist for the U.S forest service at the Deschutes national forest. She has been there for over 15 years, she is very experienced at her job. She grew up in Northwest Indiana near Chicago, and around the Smokey mountains area. She went to the University of Indiana and Oregon state. Her job is working on the restoration of the forest, and helps make eco systems better. Right now she is working the rare plant survey, the plant is called pumice moonwart fern. That is what we will be helping her with. We met up with her, at around 9:30, and went to Sand Springs, the place is a desert like area to look for the pumice moonwart fern. The area was dry and it was pretty warm. Our job was to make a grid pattern and flag all of the pumice moonwarts that we find. It turned out to be a lot of ferns out there, more then there was last year, some of them are hard to see, because they are very low to the ground. Some of them are only sticking out of the ground by like only one inch, they were very difficult to see, and we missed some of them as we were picking up the flags. We had to count the ones that we missed as we went along. We did that for a couple of hours, then we took our lunch break for about 45 minutes. Then we got back to work for another hour or so, and after that we called it a day. We went to the city of Bend, to the public library and worked on updating our blogs. Then we went back to camp, and we just made the showers before they closed them for the day. After that we had some dinner, we had buttered chicken and rice, which was very good. Then I went to bed at around ten, because we have another early day tomorrow.  

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