It was a beautiful day to be on the trail with the Wednesday hiking group. Until things turned just about as ugly as I’ve ever seen them. We had a general idea in mind of where we were going and how we were going to get there. Until we didn’t. That’s part of the adventure I suppose, but our chosen path led to near disaster. For some reason, we wound up climbing a mountain we never should have climbed–there was no trail and our ascent took us in the wrong direction. Once we realized the error of our ways, we should have aborted and retreated, but we didn’t. Halfway up when the climb became near impossible for some of the less hardy among us, we should have said our goodbyes to the strong ones and headed back down the way we came. It was a collective cluster fuck and a comedy of errors. Except it wasn’t funny. Perhaps we’ve learned our lesson. We had one guy nearly pass out from dehydration (he hadn’t brought enough water for our elongated hike). One guy had to literally be pushed, pulled and carried up the mountain after he collapsed in exhaustion. It was a pretty scary thing to witness. The mountain climb kicked my ass as well, but I worked my way up slow and steady, eventually reaching the ridge road. How bad were things? None of us had any desire for our traditional after-hike gathering to drink beer and eat lunch. No permanent damage, so I guess we should consider ourselves blessed.
Pictures from the day:
Anyway, we’ll try it again tomorrow.
So this was even worse than that monster path you did the other day. Good God. And poor Scott. Well, let that be a lesson to you all. If your gut tells you to go back, but peer pressure tells you to forge ahead, ignore the peer pressure.
Well, it wasn’t as steep as Monday, but more than twice as long a climb, which made it worse in my mind. I had no idea we were tackling the big Kalaklan mountain, but yeah, I had a bad feeling early on and I should have listened. I do indeed hope the lesson has been learned!