Dingle Road

To give people who are not field trained (i.e. only those of us that haven't wintered at Davis in the last couple of years) an opportunity to get outside (and hence get some excercise) the station management team have allowed access to Dingle Road, so called because it heads to Dingle Lake. It goes past many of my radar (within 1km or so of station), before meandering up Heidemann Valley and turning a corner and rising a little to get to Dingle Lake. So one afternoon when we had nothing on, a group of us headed out for a walk in incredibly bright sunshine. The sunshine heated the rocks of the Vestfold Hills that surround Davis to a much higher temperature than the air, resulting in obvious heat-haze on the horizon, despite the cold.
Dingle Lake is one of the hyper-saline lakes in the Vestfolds that never freezes. It is much slatier to taste than sea water and the small mouthful I had made me feel decidedly queezy during the walk back. Anyway, it is a suprisingly picturesque walk despite the lack of vegetation and being confined to the roughly graded track. There is still enough snow around to make many of the
hills look attractive and the rocks themselves are often very clearly patterned due to their make-up or scarred by glacial action. Anyway, the picture above shows some of the rocks coverered by the salty water at the edge of the lake. And here's a picture of the people
we went with, including plumbers, carpenters, a boiler maker, a weather forecaster, a plant operator, a radio tech, a radio operator and one electronics engineer (me)!