There are pure Antarctic moments I will remember: the first pinch of the cold in my lungs when I stepped off the plane, the spray of fish breath from a Weddell seal surfacing in a hole in the sea ice twelve inches from my face (and the curious, quiet seal eyes gazing afterwards), holding a 4.5 billion year old asteroid in my hands at the lunch table, surviving a night of stiff wind in a tent using a deadman.

This past Sunday morning, about 1am, the weather broke as we stood outside our North Face dome tents near the base of Castle Rock. We?d hiked four miles in a frozen fog, and suddenly a horizon materialized from the seamless haze; the rock emerged in a halo of mist, and for a moment we could even see four boats at the far end of McMurdo Sound (The Polar Star, the Russian icebreaker Kriasin, our fuel tanker, and a decommissioned Soviet icebreaker-cum-cruise-ship, the Kapitan Khlebnikov). It was one of those moments to remember.

Twenty minutes later we were cinched in the sleeping bags listening to wind ripple through the windfly at 20 knots, hoping the trucker?s hitches I?d lashed to the deadman we buried in the snow were real trucker?s hitches. Note to self: when the icy fog suddenly clears in the Antarctic night, something might be up. Bright moments are ephemeral, especially in Antarctica.

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