Happy New Year to everyone back home!! We celebrated the start of the year in fine style. We had the morning off to catch up on sleep after seeing the new year in last night. For many of us, the first day of 2015 meant a change of clothes (yay for clean underwear!!) and two brave souls (Ryan and Jim) even managed a ‘shower’ in the meeting tent.

Mother Nature also provided some interesting weather for us to start off the year. Instead of the clear blue skies and sunshine we have had for the last few days, we had low clouds and light snow; also beautiful in its own way. But it was relatively warm and not at all windy, so we headed out to work in the afternoon, doing some sweeps over the blue ice.

Caption: A view of the low clouds and light snow over the blue ice.  For scale, the solid snow features on the ice in the foreground that look kind of wave-like are roughly a couple of feet high.

Several of our skidoos have been a bit fussy over the last few days, deciding to go on strike at random times throughout the day, and today was no exception. So we ended up heading back to camp a bit early so that Johnny and Brian could talk with the mechanics back at McMurdo and try to figure out how to solve the problems.

For the most part though life here is settling into a comfortable routine, and we look forward to another few weeks of successful collecting.

-written by Christine Floss, Jan 1, 2015, Davis-Ward