For individual contest day, we were HYPED! One of the most fun things about individual competitions is that we have no idea where we are going! We met in a Bass Pro parking lot and started off the day with team stretches and cheers!
Forming the UMN! We then followed the caravan to an educational forest. We were ready to go!
The site was amazing; there was a mix of coastal plain sediment and piedmont soils as we moved down the hill. We got to see great examples of plinthite, discontinuities between depositional events, and stratified structures (indicating low pedogenic development). Please enjoy these sneaky pictures of our judgers hard at work during the competition!
Sampling from the pit face
One really cool thing about this competition is that while not all of our judgers could go to the individual pits, the rest of our competitors got to compete in group judging! We formed a team with Texas A&M and had a lot of fun getting to know them and learning from each other as we completed pits together.
Some of the pit faces from the group competition!
After the competition, we all came back together and enjoyed some delicious catered barbeque. Because we were in an educational forest, we decided to go on a hike around the area! There were so many signs explaining the trees (which many of our judgers were able to guess before seeing the sign), farming equipment, and other ecological scientific research (including the bug trap to monitor population change pictured here). We ended the day with a trip to Waffle House since we don’t have those in Minnesota. It was then off to bed to prepare for the group competition the next day! Here are pictures from the educational forest!
