When I accepted the REU at UCSD, I really did not know what I was getting myself into. I knew that I might be making work trips around to different fields of study, but I never expected to end up hiking through canyons with some of my coworkers just for fun.

This morning, we headed out early, toward Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. For the next five hours, we hiked around the crest of the canyon, rappelled down into a slot canyon, and traversed the canyon bottoms. The desert canyon was beautiful.  It was a stark change from the meditteranean type environment of La Jolla. So far, the title “Engineers for Exploration” is holding up.