Castle Rock Loop

McMurdo's Berg Field Center outfits all field camps with the gear they need to survive Antarctic conditions in the summertime. In the winter, just a few hearty BFC'ers stay behind to sort, clean, inventory, and repair all the gear that got used and abused during the rush of the summer season. Plus, this winter team is responsible for maintaining the couple of recreational trails that remain open in wintertime. Knowing this, I asked them if I could go along next time they had to do a maintenance trip around Castle Rock loop, the longest rec trail you can reach by foot from McMurdo town. They kindly scheduled their next trip for that on a Monday (my day off), and I was thrilled to get to go along.

We loaded up a Piston Bully with survival bags, replacement trail flags, and other equipment for fixing old or planting new flags...

...and off we went, in early afternoon, with a full moon rising.

You can still see a faint glow of the sun on that horizon to the left, which is amazing to me. But mostly it was us feeling tough in our red BFC jump suits, walking along the flag line in the mid-winter darkness.

The weather's been so mild the past couple months, there weren't many flags down along the trail, but we did re-set or replace maybe a half-dozen of them, by the headlights of the Piston Bully.

We also opened and inspected the "apples"--the survival pods placed along the trail--and dug out the snow that had managed to blow into them through the imperfect seals on their doors.

I've never been on Castle Rock Loop trail before this (and in the darkness wasn't able to take pictures of Castle Rock itself, with Mount Erebus looming behind it, though we could see the lovely outlines of the scene by eye) and will have to make sure to walk back out there some day toward the end of my time here to see it all in the sunshine. For now, I was really happy for the Piston Bully, as even though I didn't even do much physical work at all, I was DARN cold and tired after three hours out in even these mild-ish winter conditions. Such a fun adventure, though!