Rafting!!

Last night I returned from what was likely the most fun thing I have ever been paid to do, namely go river rafting. As part of our program the entire group goes for a three day geology rafting trip down the Deschutes river in central Oregon. Due to the presence of a significant quantity of water and my lack of water proof equipment this post will be picture free and thus I will try to keep it to the point to risk boring my few loyal readers. On Sunday afternoon we drove a couple hours over the cascades to Madras the nearest town to the put-in point. The next morning we packed our stuff into dry bags and after an hour so of geology lectures we got in the rafts. We proceeded down the river stopping for lunch and geology talks eventually reaching camp. The following two days followed the same pattern with a couple additional incidents. The most memorable of these were a lecture delivered from on top of a composting toilet, and stranding our program director and the math mentor on a rock in the middle of a set of rapids. All in all the trip was a ton of fun and a pretty broad lesson in geology.
Today was HJA day at the experimental forest, a sort of open house to show off why this is such an important place. There t were a variety of interesting talks which I went to in the morning. In the afternoon there were trips to different study sites but after the first three other students and I decide to go for a creek walk back. Due to underestimating the distance the trip ended up involving more trailblazing than I expected but it was fun and pretty none the less. Tomorrow my research group goes to Corvallis to meet with our adviser and the professor helping me with tensor field visualization. The rest of the program gets the day off though most will use the time to get a jump on research which starts in earnest on Monday.