Wednesday, 23 June 2010

The view from my tent was spectacular. As I had my bear with me, I took a photo of it as well – to show Paul where I had woken up. Joel, true to his military training gave us only 10 minutes to get dressed and everybody who was late to the morning exercises had to do 10 push-ups (those for the guys and squats for the girls). At first that might have seemed a bit unfair, but by the next day we were not sure the push-ups weren’t the easier option. Fortunately, I was never late, so I didn’t get to try out either option. :P

After breakfast, we set off up the mountainside. We did not take the trail as it was too wet and Joel said we would find it later again. We saw the great waterfall of the previous day and it did not seem so great any more. We were high above it by now. Soon enough we got to our first patch of snow. We had a snowball fight (remember, it was the 23rd of June) and Joel and Lauri did push-ups on the snow. Then we all crossed it and picked up something that Joel called a trail, but I just thought it was the same mountainside as before, only on the other side of the snow.

We had lunch by the river quite high up the mountain and there was much more snow there. I put all my melted chocolates into the snow for a bit and they became edible again. We had team-time after our meal and then we kept on climbing. At one point Joel had a serious talk with everybody telling us of the importance of eating snacks as the amount of calories we were burning required us to be diligent in eating extra calories or else we would be really weak and become a burden for others.

Once we got to the top, we started going sideways. This meant crossing many glacial rivers that had a snow covering, but we had to be really careful as not to fall in. Joel kept making the trail for us just in case. As we waited, we had fun sending snowballs down the glaciers to see if they gathered more snow onto them and how far they got.

We had our dinner on top of some rocks in between glaciers and saw the two lakes that Joel had planned us to camp by. However, there was no point in trying to get closer to these, as they were both still covered with ice and we did not have warm enough equipment to sleep on snow. So we started our descent to find a grassy area to sleep on.

The day had become a really long one by the time we found a suitable area by a really rapid river at 11.30 pm. It was getting dusky again and we set up camp. The area we had stopped at was not really flat enough and the green grass on the other side of the rapid river looked much more inviting for setting up tents. Several of the guys found a place to jump across and put up their tents there. I just shuddered watching them cross the fast and furious water. Little did I know that I would have to cross it the following day.