Hey everyone!   Sorry I didn’t end up sending a blog out last night. But we’re safe and the storm has finally stopped. Yesterday, we had ‪a 9am‬ start time to clean up camp. Hosie got on his skidoo and fetched all of the debris that blew away from our area. He also said that surprisingly enough, the runway still looks to be in great shape (good to hear for our resupply ‪on December 26‬). We replaced John S and Elena’s windshields on their skidoos because they got blown off by the wind and we dug out the drifts to use the snow as valence covers for the Science and Poo tents. Camp is looking good again.

After we cleaned up camp, we went up to the Davis Nunatak to get a birds eye view of the region to see where else we needed to look in the moraines. The weather on top of the nunatak was picture perfect – sunny with little wind. But once we descended and headed towards a small patch of blue ice we wanted to search, the wind picked up again. We went back to camp for lunch and to warm up and then headed out to a moraine afterwards. The winds at the moraine were around 30 mph with a temperature of -15C. But! We found ~20 meteorites! So we did pretty good! We’ve been doing a lot of foot searching this season. Not much on our skidoo’s. Hosie and Jim like moraine searching better than systemic searching, anyway. Hosie thinks systemic searching is a lot like mowing your lawn – just going back and forth. Jim thinks it’s fun to try to pick the meteorites out of thousands of rocks. It’s much more of a challenge.
Jim said this weather is typical for Davis-Ward. Each day is “marginal” meaning it’s right on the cusp of ok and not ok. Jim’s been great though – he always asks us how we’re feeling and if we want to go out and he’s been making good calls. Today, we had a tent day because the winds were too high again. But we’re safe. And we’re out of the storm.

Chat soon, Sheridan