Congratulations Team Henderson! It has been a month since we started working together and in that time we have managed to hit our fist milestone. Within the month, we finished collecting all the samples associated with annual, as a result we got home from the field last night, a day early, and will be having a celebratory lunch today!
This is an especially important event in my eyes for two reasons. First off, celebratory lunches are an amazing morale booster for continuing to do hard work. It is a reminder to us interns that our mentors are impressed with our work and that they see us as human beings deserving of positive reinforcement. Secondly, for me, this celebration represents the end of the introductory period. Whenever you meet new people, start a new project, begin living in a new place, there is always an introductory period where you test out the water. You start getting to know your mentors, your roommates, the city you live in, you start making opinions on all the people surrounding you and deciding on how well you mesh together and how enjoyable the time together will be. After this month of adventures I know we have become a well oiled machine, unlike all of our personal gear after camping at the dunes, with no sand grinding our gears.
Though we work in the desert we have experienced some extremely cold temperatures. As a team we conquered the rain storms, sand storms,the grapple/hail storms, washed out roads, three flat tires, one broken jack, the unfortunate forgetting of our food bag, over 30 hours in the car, temperature fluxuating from 40’s to 80 within minutes and of course emergency improvisation of all the equipment that doesn’t work when you most need it.
Once again, team Henderson (we need a better name), I look forward to the following months with great pleasure knowing that we still have much more to learn about each other but thoroughly satisfied knowing that each and every person on this team is dedicated to quality research and will work together, and help each other out to achieve it!

Thanks go to Lesly, Sara, Mary, Carson, Elizabeth and Laura, team Henderson.