Then the door opened, and my own arrogance slapped me in the face. Hard.

White. The whole world was a blazing, crisp white.

I was on White Mars.

It's hard for me to describe what it felt like to be plunged into such an alien environment; I'm so used to being surrounded by what I guess you'd call the "traditional" colours of Mars - the reds, browns oranges and tans - that when I stepped out onto that snow-covered plateau I honestly felt a moment of panic as I told myself, ridiculously, that I'd been abducted in my sleep and taken to another planet entirely: Europa! I thought, staring at the vast expanse of ice all around me, I've been kidnapped and taken to Europa!

But no... looking more closely I saw that the plateau stretching away from me in all directions was smooth, its surface was flat, just plain ice and snow. There were no fractures or rilles or ridges anywhere in sight. So, I wasn't on Europa - maybe I was a tiny spaceman novelty figure stood on the top of a huge, iced cake..! :-)

I took a tentative step forwards, moving away from the airlock, and my eyes opened wide in surprise as I heard, and felt, my boots crunching down into the snow. That was so odd! Beyond "odd", it was Wrong! Unnatural! I took a few more steps, and gasped each time my boots sank into the ground with a softly-muffled scrunching noise as the snow compressed beneath my weight. I lifted up my foot and saw clumps of snow pasted over its sole and heel, and tried in vain to shake them off, balancing precariously on one leg, like a stork -

Then Lara started to lead me away from the airlock and away from the Outpost. We walked for ten minutes or so, scrunching through the martian snow. I felt like Scott, or one of those early Terran arctic explorers, the only thing missing was a sled behind me. Then the strangest thing happened - Lara told me to trust her, and to close my eyes. I wasn't at all sure about this; after all, I'd only met her an hour earlier, for all I knew she could have been a psycho or something... but she had been friendly until then I decided to take a chance, and squeezed my eyes tight shut.

The world went dark, and I felt her take my hand in hers and start walking forwards. I followed her blindly, taking small, uncertain steps, hearing only the scrunch-crunch-crisch of snow flattening beneath my boot soles -

Suddenly I felt hands on my waist, holding me steady, and wondered why, but didn't have time to ask why. "Okay, we're here..!" Lara said brightly through my headphones, "you can look now, if you like..." I took a deep breath. "Look straight up... tilt your head right back... that's it, right back..." I heard her whisper, and opened my eyes -

Oh guys… I wish you could have seen it. Up at 80 degrees latitude there are no mountains, no hills or jagged crater rims, no vertical relief in the landscape at all and so no intrusions along the skyline. The horizon is simply that, a horizon, a flat, razor-sharp line separating ground from sky. And that sky is... immense, huge, overpowering, greater even than the sky from the deep Outback, or from the flat lava plains over in Tharsis...

And the colour! I've described the colours of the Tharsis Outback sky to you before - the caramel, honey and tan tones which run into each other during the day - but this was... unique. The sky was pink - no, *not* the pale, washed-out colour people think of when they hear something described as "pink"; the polar sky is a deep, rich colour which seems to glow as if it was being lit from behind, and standing there, staring straight up into it, I felt as if I was inside one of those snow-scene paper-weights and someone was shining a red lamp in at me through the glass dome. I've seen a lot of big skies out here mom, but never one like that. It was ... luxurious, that's the only word for it...