blazing trails over a millions colors of white

What goes 60kph, has a studded track, warm hands, and is red and yellow with a black helmet? Me on a snow machine!

Typically, we mind our own business and work in McMurdo, or drive the same routes out to the airstrips and back, but on Wednesday, my name was drawn for a "boondoggle" ski doo trip to a point called "Room with a View." This is the place on our island where our peninsula meets the volcano, Mount Erebus.

After two weeks of weather delays and watching multiple other trips head out on this trip in front of our "Wednesday" crew, we finally had our turn under mostly cloudy skies to venture out on the snow.

Our first jaunt was out to Pegasus White Ice Runway. This air strip is about 10 nautical miles from McMurdo, but more like 17 miles when we skirt along the permanent sea ice road to get there. The airfield is named for the Pegasus airplane that resides there permanently due to an "emergency landing" (aka. crash). This site is now of some historical value and a fortunate number of us on station get to tour the site.

Most of the airplane is buried in windblown snow now. We all got a laugh when Dave, a sheet metal worker down here, told us that he had a work order for the Pegasus last week. They needed him to cover a part of the plane with sharp edges so no one would injure themselves. It seems counter-intuitive to work on a crashed plane, but this is a strange place for an airplane to be parked anyway!

The second part of our trip was back to our starting point and then on to Room with a View. Before heading out of the area, we had to refuel our ski doos. I took a picture of our line at the fuel pumps. We had 10 people in our party, and we were all able to ride our own machine!

After covering about 12, or more miles by ski doo along the permanent Ross Ice Shelf and back up onto the spine of our peninsula on Ross Island, we climbed to our perch at the side of the volcano and looked back at our travels. Pegasus White Ice Runway was just a few specks in the far distance, but the open water of the Ross Sea was grand sight below the Royal Society Mountain Range and the Dry Valleys.

I had a great time singing in my helmet, and smiling really big, and enjoying my heated hand grips. I didn't get cold at all! I had my thick long underwear top and bottom, a pair of thick fleece long underwear bottoms, my awesome windpants, my new mustard-olive colored polartech fleece from Laura, my black Scott Base windbreaker, and my big red parka, plus a neck gaitor, Laura's hand-me-down arm warmers, two layers of gloves, a pair of sock liners and expedition-weight socks, blue FDX boots, and my super-cool new hat from Matt. If you think that is a lot of gear, I had about half that amount again in my back pack, along with food for lunch and our leader, Toby, also had to pull 5 big red bags of survival gear; just in case we got stuck.

My favorite parts of the trip were seeing all the different "colors" of white while we rolled up and down hills and looked across the sea ice and up into the clouded sky. I also loved our descent from Room with a View when we started coming down the hill on fresh powder.