Brookes Hut

We did a two-day hike into the Vestfold Hills near Davis Base in Antarctica as part of our training for the field work we'll be doing for our science projects. We stopped at a small hut called Brookes Hut for dinner, and then we bivvied out overnight. When we left the base it was blowing gale force winds, and when we were eating dinner in the hut we could hear the wind howling and watch the snow go horizontally past our windows. The thought of having to go and sleep outside on the ground, as part of the training, didn't seem too appealing. But by the time I'd found a big rock to shelter behind and had crawled into my bivvy bag and sleeping bag, it was nice and cozy, and when I woke up in the morning it was a beautiful day with calm weather and blue skies, and a tropical 5 degrees above zero! The hardest bit was actually trying to get to sleep in the 24-hour sunlight.

Anyway, here is a panorama shot of the frozen bay from up behind the hut. Again, apologies for lack of technical / aesthetic prowess in this shot - it's purely illustrative of where we stayed. The stripes in the hills are igneous intrusion dykes, i.e. they formed millions of years ago when magma pushed its way up through fault lines in the normal rock. The entire range of hills is striped like this; it's amazing.