It is fair to say yesterday was one of the two hardest days of physical challenge of my life. The other “hardest day,” I was twenty-one and fresh out of college and the first time really on my own. A friend and I were in the Rocky Mountains of Glacier National Park for my first day of my first backpacking trip. I was using my brand new $21.95 REI budget backpack to carry my 70 pound load. Padded straps would have been extra. We had 3,500 vertical feet to climb on a five mile trail, then another 3,000 feet to hike back down the other side of the pass. Heat stroke hit me long before we found camp, but there was no possibility of stopping. The pain and exhaustion were still excruciating hours after we set up camp.
Yesterday was day III in the Forbidden Kingdom of Mustang. Madly shifting gusts of wind of about seventy mph often threw us off the sometimes narrow trail. We hiked up 2000′, then down 1500′, up 2000′, down 1000′, and up 1500′ and down 800′, all of it over 11,500′ elevation. The 25,000′ peaks of the Annapurna range appeared and disappeared through the day, alternately hidden by clouds and the “hills” we were hiking in. Ha, hills! Those hills are all 14,000′ high, with scrub growing almost to their rounded tops. Each of the passes was grueling. We were not nearly acclimatized to this elevation and the day’s trek seemed endless. All there ever was to do was to take the next step, carrying the pain, fear, and exhaustion along with us to the camp. (The writing about Day IV will give a better idea of Day III.)
It rained last night and I found frozen water on my tent in the morning. I was too dead to think about writing. The mountains got a fresh coat of snow above 20,000′. I was happy to have a pair of hot water bottles at the bottom of my sleeping bag. They were filled with water boiled before bedtime and they became my drinking water for the morning trek, refilled at lunch with freshly boiled water.
[envira-gallery slug=”mustang02″]
