A chilly tent day

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Nina and Ellen act completely normal for Cindy’s index photo. It’s important to do a meteorite dance before searching or they won’t come out of their hidey-holes, not even for chocolate

This morning we awoke to winds ~25 mph shaking our tent walls and temperatures around -1 degree F. These are pretty marginal conditions in which to search for meteorites, and we had a morning flight scheduled to deliver our runway groomer anyway, so we put our work day on hold to see how conditions would shape up. It hasn’t gotten better as of this writing, and the snow is starting to drift around our tents and boxes. I’ve been out twice, and both times I had to punch away a wall of snow that had built up around our tent door before I could get out. Our flight has been delayed twice–now it’s scheduled to arrive in about 10 minutes. We’ll see if it does. In the meantime we’re resigned to another tent day, which have actually been quite rare this season as compared to previous seasons. Since we’ve had some extra time, we’ve been working on our interview series Stay tuned for the next profile on our very own Con, to be posted today. In the meantime, please enjoy this index photo from Cindy. Cindy is our meteorite photographer, which means she’s responsible for ensuring that we have an image of each meteorite that we find along with its unique number and a scale bar clearly visible. Since we’ve collected over 450 samples this season, that adds up to quite a few photos. In order to keep track of where the data are on her SD card, Cindy takes an index photo at the beginning of each day. At first we didn’t realize she was doing this, but as soon as we did we leapt into action, naturally. We are so helpful.

–Posted by Nina by the sounds of blowing snow sanding the exterior of the tent, south Miller Range, 11 January 2016