The mountain and the wall

First things first; I climbed my first mountain yesterday.

After a foreboding evening, rode my bike out to our pre-arranged meeting place. It was pouring rain as I rode there (I brought an extra pair of clothes to change before we got underway). Pouring rain as we were driving to the mountains, pouring rain as we started walking, pouring rain all day, didn't stop until about 5am the next morning.

The walk out was fairly uneventfull. I fell into a river (oops) but my equipment was all waterproofed (as good as possible anyways) so nothing got too unhappy. The my pants were dripping and the river was a hell of alot colder than the rain. Funny enough, the heat generated by my body walking was enough to almost completely dry out my pants by the time we made it to camp.

We setup camp, erected a few tarps. I put myself incharge of the fire (because I'm good with fire and not very good with someone else's tents or tying complicated knots to hang tarps n'stuff) ; got a helper and we ranged into the forrest to get some dead wood to burn.

Ended up finding several full dead trees (which we stripped and dragged) I got a small fire going as we heaped more and more wood on.

The fire wasn't very happy with us turned to smouldering wet wood... until I provided a massive amount of fresh O2 for an extended period... turned it into a raging wood eating monster.

*smile*

We kept that fire running very hot for almost 5 hours... since the beginning, we were throwing stones into the fire. I figured that when night hit, we would need a portable, containable source of heat. Eventually, we built a seccond smaller fire pit closer to our tarp shelter which we were using to dry our shoes n'stuff. (made a dry line to hang clothes on) Of course, I followed our "guide's" instructions and packed as lite as possible. Which means one pair of pants (which I was wearing) one pair of shoes, some socks and another shirt. (well... all the food, camping equipment, sleeping bag etc. makes my pack around the 60 pound range... but the thought counted, I guess) Which means while drying my shoes, I had a large rock (which had been around the fire for a few hours) to stand on. It became my island; which radiated heat and spoke to me of the wonderous earth.

It was quite the sight. A group of Ninja's afraid to go out in the rain.

Of course we were all soaked to the bone, mildly cold (ok... really cold) and pretty much exhausted from battling all the above for the day; but still.

Went to bed around 12, woke up at 8 with a potentially bright and sunny day ahead of us. *yeah*


After a few hours of climbing and seeing some *amazing* scenery; I finally managed to get to this saddle clost to the summit and take this shot. (yeah, about another 400 vert. feet away. -- I wussed out... sue me)

UNREAL! -- you see that trail... sorta centered in the shot? Thats where we came from that... the really cool thing, is you can follow it in the picture, following the river, shoots off to the left pretty hard and runs parallel to the river until its out of the picture. Thats right... the ground covered in the picture is less than a third of the distance we travelled. Oh yeah, that photo was taken at 7400 feet. I ended up going up another 3-400 feet... until it was break time. One of the other guys (*laugh* he ended up paying for this later too...) took an extra walk to the summit to pee off the edge.

Went right over the mountain, came back at our camp from the back side. Going down, contrary to popular belief, is actually much more difficult than going up. Except for the first kilometer... which we slid down the side of a mountain on scree. Climbed down another waterfall, hugged the side of a mountain for a kilo or two... either our guide was just amazing or he was using his GPS (or something) cause we ended up on a trail that took us right to camp.

Hiking back was brutal agony (cause we'd all hit our physical walls getting up and coming down that mountain) but cool. As I was pace leading the group, I got to witness thousands of butterflies take flight when my shaddow crossed over them. Made the whole experiance seem outside of the real world.

There's soo much more I could say; but I'm not gonna. I'm sure you guys are pretty eyesore reading my post anyways. If requested, I have a few other photos I could post.