As another busy year winds down at LRLT, we find ourselves starting in on all of those traditional end of the year projects. Updating files, rearranging the office, finding homes for those random piles of paper that have lived on our desks for months now & cleaning up our back storage room. But as 2013 draws to a close, we also want to take a moment to reflect on everything that has happened over the past year, not only have we conserved another ranch, we’ve hosted tours, had a summer intern & participated in a huge number of workshops.
- January: We dove headlong into the accreditation process & began working diligently on updating our policies & procedures. January also brought an opportunity to present at the Lemhi County Cattlemen’s Winter School to give an update on our current projects & was the first public debut of our official LRLT video. (Check it out here!)
- February: First on the agenda for February was teaming up with our partners at the Central Idaho Rangelands Network (CIRN) & Sustainable Northwest to host a public, in person, encore presentation of the NEPA 101 workshop originally viewed as a webinar by the members of CIRN as part of an effort to better understand the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) & all its corresponding regulations. Following the NEPA 101 workshop, a full day followup was hosted for CIRN participants dubbed “NEPA 201” which delved even further into the world of NEPA.
- March: The third week in March was spent celebrating one of Lemhi County’s cornerstone industries: agriculture. With a list of partners too extensive to name, LRLT had the opportunity to visit area school & assist with a variety of activities in conjunction with National Agriculture Week. LRLT’s involvement included dissecting Snickers bars & creating an “ag web” with fifth graders, discuss the importance of conservation with 7th graders, helping 3rd & 4th graders through the wheat, byproducts & milk stations with Idaho Farm Bureau’s “Moving Agriculture to the Classroom” trailer & board members Katie Hoffman & Tom McFarland each spoke to a high school class about beef production & their individual ranches.
- April: April was devoted to working on our new & ongoing conservation projects. From starting the month out with a board field trip to view a new project (Nope, no details yet, but I promise you’ll get to hear more about this project in 2014!) & continuing negotiations on other conservation easement projects.
- May: With their bags packed, LRLT Executive Director, Kristin Troy, & board member Merrill Beyeler, hopped a cross country flight to spend some time in Washington D.C. as part of the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition, another program of Sustainable Northwest’s. They spent a busy week navigating D.C. & meeting with our delegation to advocate for issues such as public lands grazing, private lands conservation & ranching.
- June: Some much needed help joined LRLT & Salmon Valley Stewardship’s (SVS) staff the first week in June in the form of our shared intern, Jenny Gonyer, from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Jenny had the opportunity to spend her time with LRLT assisting in completing the annual monitoring on our conserved properties, participating in tours, helping with our annual Working Lands Celebration & getting a crash course in public lands grazing assembling binders for CIRN ranches.
- July: While we all managed to snag a little vacation time in July, it was by far the busiest month of the year. After being advised by many of our land trust partners to plan on spending the last two weeks before our accreditation application was due with the entire staff working only on accreditation, we decided to take a chance & make a few changes to the Working Lands Celebration. First we moved it to July to prevent conflicting deadlines & then we chose to hold it at the Sacajawea Center rather than on one of our conserved properties to simplify the set up (you’d be amazed at the amount of stuff we previously had to haul to make a hay field into the perfect location for a picnic!). Happily both of those changes were positive & we had our best picnic yet, in fact, even though we roasted an entire pig, we ran out of food. A definite first for us!
- August: Not to be out shined by July, August matched it’s frantic pace. Sadly instead of a fun month of successful events & interesting field tours, August was marked by the constant hum (& eventual whine & overheating) of the printer. While the August pages of my planner are filled with notes & deadlines, we apparently made up for all our time out of the office in July by writing grants, submitting grant reports & of course, accreditation. The final accreditation push also meant spending a lot of time learning obscure nearly forgotten facts about LRLT & compiling those massive binders.
- September: There are now very few happenings in LRLT’s history I can’t recant in detail or policies I can’t recite verbatim, so September was a welcome visitor as I dumped those 17 pound binders in the mail & religiously followed their progress via their tracking number until they reached their destination in New York. With that out of the way, it was time for a little celebration & organizational development, so LRLT’s entire staff loaded up, made the 4 a.m. trek to Idaho Falls & climbed on the plane to spend five days in New Orleans at the Land Trust Alliance Rally.
- October: October was a month filled with meetings hosted in Salmon. From the Heart of the Rockies Initiative (our regional land trust organization) meetings to a multi-day “Community Based Conservation Transferability” workshop. Kristin, along with board members Tom & Merrill & Gina from SVS also made the trek to Island Park to participate in the High Divide Collaborative Land & Water Conservation Fund Proposal event, giving key decision makers & up close view of the landscape & the opportunity to meet with the many partners behind this funding proposal.
- November: After many months of waiting, November started out with a bang with the completion of our eighth conservation easement on the O’Neal Ranch in the Pahsimeroi Valley on the 1st. Completing this project represented the conclusion of many months of hard work by LRLT with help from our partners at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) & was the second of four conservation easements our two organizations will be completing in the Pahsimeroi Valley as part of a package funded by the Snake River Basin Adjudication Habitat fund. And again, Kristin & Merrill packed their bags for another quick trip to Washington D.C. This time representing the High Divide Collaborative’s Land & Water Conservation Fund proposal.
- December: December? Well it’s been a bit a of a welcome breather…sort of. Don’t be fooled into thinking we’ve just been holed up in the office watching it snow & enjoying some quiet. While we do manage an occasional day like that, December has again been all about projects. Wrapping up restoration projects & working on ongoing conservation easement projects. As much fun as it would be to give away a few details, we’ve got to have something to talk about in 2014, so you’ll have to stay tuned in the coming year to learn more about our new projects, new opportunities & just what exactly it is we do every day!
