Happy New Year!  Given our location just west of the international date line, we get to be among the first on the planet to celebrate the arrival of 2015.

On this particularly beautiful day, we took the opportunity to do some reconnaissance of the surrounding peaks.  This gave the newbies among us an overview of the various blue ice fields and potential locations for meteorite searching.

We then continued sweeping the blue ice field and the moraine as described in previous blogs.  Our total for today was 15 specimens collected, all chondrites and mostly found in the moraine.  Although this collection wasn’t as big a haul as yesterday, it does tell us that it will be worthwhile to search the remaining half-mile of the moraine (unfortunately!  It can be a painstaking process. . .   ).

Caption:  A photo from searching in the moraine.  Can you find the meteorite? 

We returned to camp by 4pm to prepare for our New Year’s Eve celebration.  Ryan and Jim prepared quesadillas and pizza for dinner, with various culinary contributions from the rest of us.  While we would love to be with our families back home, we know — especially from our nightly reading of the diaries of Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott — , that we’re really got it good, and we’re grateful!

-posted by the gang, New Year’s Eve 2104, Davis-Ward