Travels with Burnie: Casey Station

Casey Station from the air - it's less than half a kilometer from left to right on this photo.

Sign post on station

The wallow (aka common area)

My wall of favorites

The view to Reeve Hill from out
front of the red shed.

The Red Shed, where we all live and eat.

Fun after our first big snow.

Cross on top of Reeve Hill
(commemorating Reeve, who
was the first Casey Station
expeditioner to die in Antarctica.
It was a blizzard if you're interested).

Casey station is a much smaller place that McMurdo, which is where I've spent the majority of my Antarctic time. You can get a rough idea of it from the aerial photo at the top of the page. It shows the station, minus the wharf area, which is down a road about 1km from station. We all live, eat and socialize in the Red Shed (the big red building at the bottom). The rest of the buildings are water storage, wastewater, trades workshops, power generation, and science and operations buildings. I work most days outside on the piles of soil that look like little rectangles off the top of the road that heads to the upper left portion of the photo. Occasionally, when there's REALLY bad weather, I get to work in the yellow Science building on the far left of the photo. So, the commute to breakfast is about 2 minutes and then the commute to the work site is about 3 minutes. No driving unless there's something very heavy to take with you.

The Casey sign at the lower fuel
tanks at the wharf.

There's a ski loop (about 2km) behind the station that opens when the snow is hard enough but everything melts mid-season so the ski loop is only open from about mid-November to late December and then maybe again in late February. You can walk down to the wharf or up the rocks to Reeve Hill, which gives a nice view of station and a great view of the nearby Adelie rookery on Shirley Island.