hello again - i'm just back from opening up fossil bluff together with pete (GA) and steve (plumber).  fossil bluff is a small station (where falklands islands dependencies survey members used to winter, in the days before the name change to BAS) that serves as a fuel depot / refuelling station / general transit enabling mini-base which is used non-stop during the busy summer field seasons by aircraft flying to or from deep-field sites.  regular readers of my blog will remember that i was one of those who winterized the station in march last year.   

it was fantastic to see what a winter at 72 degrees south had done to the landscape which was mostly stripped of superficial snow by the end of last season.  as hoped for, many of the gullies in the torridonesque (scottish mountain range reference there for those who know it...) were filled in nicely with quality snow, and our carefully arranged depot of a hundred and one 205 litre avtur barrels had disappeared under a few feet of snow.  we cracked on straight away with getting the various dormant combustion engines going (skiidoos, generator, spate fuel pump) and setting up equipment at the hut like power systems run from solar panels and a wind turbine, and the HF radio set for communications with rothera and planes.  i had the weather station for aeroplane observations to set up, which worked without any problems.  

the scene was fairly idyllic - sky full of millions of tiny ice crystals thrown up by the plane's propellors producing a halo and parhelia around the sun, temperature of -20, and calm.  only a few 205 litre barrels full of rock that had blown over betrayed the meteorological violence that must have erupted during the 7 months of winter.  

anyway, the work aside, and with superb weather for most of the 5 days that i was there, myself and pete got down to the real work of climbing and skiing some of the gullies around the hut.  i took quite a bit of video footage during these little trips (of which we managed three) and i've made a few available to download here.  they have been compressed so they are little bigger than an mp3 but still look quite good i think, and give a real feel for the area and what we were up to.  i have noticed that the files i post do not get very many downloads - maybe this is because some people think that the files are going to be huge and take ages - i'm pretty sure that with the broadband connections in most places now you can downloads these in a few minutes.  anyway, enjoy!

Pete skiing the last bit of the second gulley

Climbing up our 3rd gulley

At the top of the third gulley

Pete on third descent

i've got a few more videos of skiing and hopefully i'll get some more from pete who also had his camera rolling at times, so i might put some up of me skiing.  ok, enough of this moving pictures nonsense - here are a few stills from the trip: