Yawhoo! The long awaited Alpine post!
What an incredible reality that vista must have been. With that old stone chalet, the goats and your companion, the world famous dog, I half expected a picture of Shirley Temple as Heidi in the coming photos. Very charming. It looks kind of remote on the maps. How many people did you encounter?
After our alpine region trip to the Rainbow Gathering in Utah, I could relate to your descriptions of your environment better. I can still remember at night, walking out past the firelight and standing in the hillside meadow to take care of plumbing. I gasped looking up at the Milky Way. It can be thick as cream amongst dancing beings. Having a nude snowball fight on a warm day in July was stunning. Did you get back up there this year? Any plans?
Sorry about the difficulties that weren’t volunteered by you. For pain, I carry 1600 mg of ibuprophen and two oxycodone, just in case. We also minimize our hiking per day, so as to not overdo it. We have now begun our sixties and don’t recover as quickly. It takes more for us to be physically prepared, but then that’s one primary reason for hiking. Use it or lose it. The other trick for minimizing is camping, thereby not wasting distance by having to return in one day for half a hike. We are notorious for stopping to observe and photograph, so we tend to often take the marching out of the process. We sleep with a rod in the ground and wrist bands to ground our bodies. This dramatically helps recovery and blood flow in the strained regions.
For a day hike you seem to have a pair of big packs. We carry a light daypack with two or three liters of water and a light lunch and clothes. That’s cloth shirt for shoulder burns and colder weather clothing and trade off the carry. Is that all photography equipment? What all did you take? I don’t have that much bulk unless I’m out for a night or two, but I’ve been dropping weight and will explain more in the ultra-light section. It would be neet to see a photo of an arching panorama of the Milky Way from one of those peaks, maybe with a figure or silhouette amongst it. I don’t think DF’s camera might hack something like that, even with a tripod. Too fancy for me. How long can someone stand naked and still on a cold night and who would do that?
I have a getting lost at night in the mountains story from around Corrioco Bolivia. I surmised that I might be able to hike around the other side of this particular small mountain peak to get back to town. I tried to ask a local Armayan woman in my simple Spanish and hand jesters. She, like so many, bobbed her head, smiled and said, “Si, si.” I doubt that she understood a word.
The sun dropped. It became pitch black. I could recognize only the dark and light tones in the grass signifying cow trails. I began to reverse course with a minor shortcut. This meant cutting across to another hill, but to get there, I had to break my way through a thicket in a gully. Once in there, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Blindly, I got through to the other side with a sense of direction. I had however lost a favorite light sweater off of my shoulders, which I would never find. I had minimized my crossing because there could be poison snakes in these hills, especially where it is dark and thick. One step at a time, one foot directly in front of the other on another narrow trail, I crept. Suddenly my ground fell out from under me and I slid on wet tall grass around thirty feet downhill, uncontrollably. When I stopped and the pounding of my heart subsided, I realized that I could have easily broken something out there in the middle of nowhere, stranding myself. I was now even more extra careful and slow.
The darkness gave more surprises. I stumbled through a farming structure or fencing, breaking it in several spots and falling more than once. Some farmer was probably cussing in the morning, as I did that evening.
I knew if I kept heading in this direction that I would most likely find the road back into town that wraps around the mountain, but if my calculations were off, there was a drop of several hundred feet into a small white water mountain river. That would be my end of story.
I resumed my descent through the sketchy thick foliage and trees, essentially blind. There were trails that I couldn’t see, but could feel. Listening, I heard the river roar below. Still, I surmised that the road had to be around close. Suddenly, I felt myself slip, dropping down, I reached blindly for anything to hold onto to stop the fall. I felt myself submerge past my waist in liquid. Was it quicksand, mud? I had no idea. I finally found purchase with a branch, a root or something, all in a very long moment. I pulled myself out. A few feet back, there had been a small clear area. The thought occurred to me, that this could just as easily have been a cliff into the river somewhere below. I’d better wait for daylight.
So there I stood and then squatted in the pitch dark, wet and resolved. I didn’t feel confident to lay down and try to sleep. I was concerned about snakes and other jungle critters, which I knew nothing about. I squatted in a fetal like position, and occasionally standing. I found a stick and periodically would swish it in a circle around me to make sure that I was the only being in the area. I muttered and cussed.
This was November 2nd one of the Days of the Dead. On these nights each year the locals gather in the graveyard in Corioco with barrels of chichi corn liquor. The ancestors come back. The relatives grieve again for them and satisfied, they return to the otherside. The grieving process consists of drinking as much liquor as one can. After all, the more you drink, the deeper the pain of grief that you must have. There is a particular redundant rhythm with drum and flute that continues, as all dance away the nights. Natives in their finest billowing petty coat dresses and derby hats, or black suits, get totally wasted falling in the mud. It is miraculous that no one gets injured.
There I sat feeling… well. Desperately I yelled, “Donde esta la camino” with my American accent. I couldn’t pronounce, “help,” so I asked where is the road. Then in the dead of the night, a drum and flute began that redundant song. These people generally don’t speak Spanish, let alone bad accent Spanish. Someone figured that the ancestors were wandering about calling out. I was screwed.
I sat disgusted and listened to this for hours and swished. I had no water, I was horribly dry. A couple of times falling, rolling over, as I fell asleep on my feet.
As the sun rose bringing vision back into my life, I opened my eyes and looked before me. There directly before my face, hung a lemon fruit from a tree. The water had been some kind of hole, which was not but maybe five feet wide. The road was maybe ten feet on the other side of this slimy water. I gathered my tired self and drug myself back to my bed as others arose for breakfast.
Then there was the time three of us clung together holding on to each other’s shirttails, like three blind mice, on what was left of a crumbling Inca trail, 40 miles from anything. Picture the famous road of death (
https://www.google.com/search?q=coroico+bolivia+road+of+death&client=firefox-a&hs=Gs&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=vYvtU9X4McfqoASruYKgDw&ved=0CC4QsAQ&biw=1280&bih=602 or Topgear Britishin Bolivia) only a foot wide and off slippery, crumbling old Inca stones. All we had was a Bic lighter to see and there was no place to stop. The drop was a thousand feet down and as many up, just a step to the left.
I empathize your plight, lost in the dark on that cold mountain.
So, what are those short pinetree things. Baby pines coming back from a fire? A short species?
Jbee
