After tea in bed and a leisurely breakfast for a later 9:00 start today, the day starts out with an intimidating slope. Coming down yesterday into the valley where last night’s camp, Barranco camp is located, we had seen the steep path climbing out on the opposite side.
This morning, it’s covered with people, the porters and wazungu wending their way up the steep grade. This section is the closest we come to rock climbing as we pull ourselves up the rock shelves that make up the bottom of the path. Our guides give my mom and Karyn a hand on the trickier ones. As we continue, the rock scrambling gives way to a steep path full of switchbacks. At some point during this climb, our assistant guide innocent takes my mom’s backpack for her.
This morning, it’s covered with people, the porters and wazungu wending their way up the steep grade. This section is the closest we come to rock climbing as we pull ourselves up the rock shelves that make up the bottom of the path. Our guides give my mom and Karyn a hand on the trickier ones. As we continue, the rock scrambling gives way to a steep path full of switchbacks. At some point during this climb, our assistant guide innocent takes my mom’s backpack for her.
After one final steep rock scramble, we’re at the top of this particular climb, enveloped in clouds and not able to see anything beyond the mountaintop sometimes, although the wind would wear the clouds thin enough to see where we were headed for a few moments. For now, we go down. A short descent before another ascent. We can see the camp where we’ll stay this night, but we still have a very steep descent and another ascent before we reach it. Ironically, after all the ups and downs today, as well as the steepest terrain yet, we have hardly changed elevation at all and Karanga, where we will spend the night, is at virtually the same altitude as last night’s camp although it is far more exposed than the other one, which accounts for the coldness and lack of vegetation here as compared to our last camp.
The short, 4-hour hike for today means that we’ve made it in time for lunch. Had we decided to do a 6-day hike of the mountain we would be moving on this afternoon to climb to the next camp.
We have the whole afternoon free and we take a nap. After that nice nap, we walk over to a cairn, visible from our tent, that looks impossibly tall. It is as tall as I am and yet it somehow stays standing. Karyn decides that we ought to build our own, and we do. Then clouds roll in and we are blind in the fog on the short walk back to the tents.
We have the whole afternoon free and we take a nap. After that nice nap, we walk over to a cairn, visible from our tent, that looks impossibly tall. It is as tall as I am and yet it somehow stays standing. Karyn decides that we ought to build our own, and we do. Then clouds roll in and we are blind in the fog on the short walk back to the tents.
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