We woke to a beautiful sunny morning, with almost no wind. Last night, as we went to bed, bad weather was coming in, and we thought we might not be able to go out today. We were glad to be wrong (although I was having an awesome dream when Jim woke us up!). The brief for today: a long traverse to the north to scout a region ANSMET has never been before, to see if there’s a concentration of meteorites there. Although our target glacier was visited by a few geologists two decades ago, to us, it was new exploration. By the end of the day, we’d cover a total of about 50 miles on skidoo.

Can you spot the meteorite? It’s a tough game, but someone has to do it!

We started off up a route to collect a data logger that contained data of surface heat flow on ice. While there, we looked around the morraine for meteorites (Photo 1). This large field had proved largely fruitless in the last few days, but alas we found 4 meteorites in this soup of rocks. Actually, the first meteorite was in 3 pieces, all right next to each other! Bizarre. The forth was only 15 feet away, an ordinary chondrite we suspect. All this and it wasn’t even 10:30am yet. Our traverse would yield another meteorite, but todays objective was to reach this unexplored northern edge of the forth Miller Range, so we hammered down and continued our sojourn. We drove for at least 45 – 50 minutes before we arrived at a top of a slope. Looking down was our destination, this magnificent valley of ice (Photo 2).

The glacier without a name. No really, I don’t think it’s been named.

We proceeded down in line abreast towards the bottom. No space rocks on the way down. We stopped for lunch, and to bask in the sunlight and this new place we found. We continued our search further up. Today was distinctly different from the usual systematic search of known concentrations. We were here to explore. To find out if this valley contained meteorite riches, or if it was a barren wasteland. As we searched rather briskly, the answer became apparent. The latter.

A wall of fog. I’m ready for Mars.

A wall of fog rolled in and we made a hasty retreat in the direction we came. And I do mean wall (Photo3). I pictured myself on Mars, dust storm and all. It certainly felt like that. As we escaped, we all wanted to find one last meteorite, but alas we would not. We refueled twice on the way back to camp, as a measure of our distance travelled today. We were greeted by a light snow shower was we pulled into camp (Photo4). Although our meteorite count was not impressive by any means, our journey to a destination unknown was not too shabby.

Our camp in the tiny distant as we ride on home.

– From Con, Iggy Ridge, North Miller Range, Antarctica. (PS: Hugs and kisses to Sharon and Rupert, and Lilac, and my XBox One) (minor editing by rph)