With the sky in an obviously cantankerous mood, we walked away from El Chalten – in a different direction – for our last overnight hike with Sebastian and Hannes.
Maybe it was because we would soon be heading in different directions after two weeks of travelling together, or I was still tired from the last four days or maybe it was just the steep hill we were hiking up, but the one thing I was sure of was that I didn't want to be there.
We'd been warned that the track was boggy in places which wasn't great news for my boots that were losing their sole. Yes, that on top of worn inner padding. But in the end, it didn't really matter. We had a few good moments of bright sunshine and happiness, until we hit the boggy section and it started to rain. Hoping that things would improve we were carefully picking our way through the mud to avoid wet boots.
Then, for the first time in our hiking history, it started really bucketing down. No we're not sheltered, just really lucky. Oops, I don't think I should have written that.
Add to that gusts of wind which were almost knocking us off our feet, along with driving rain so hard it felt like needles on my cheeks, so I didn't even want to look up from under my hood. Effectively there could have been pink elephants flying through the air and we wouldn't have seen them.
By the time we reached camp after walking for 4.5 hours, our pants were soaking wet as were our boots, because at some point it had seemed useless or even impossible to avoid the bog. The camp site was empty and it was still pouring, but luckily there was a tiny shelter about 3m by 2m where we could hang up our clothes and wait out the afternoon. We crowded in and pooled all our sweets, eating them all for lack of anything better to do. With the way things had turned out, we knew that Jeff and I had missed out on seeing Laguna Torro and the last glacier.
The next morning, the rain had turned to light snow and the ground was still frosty from the cold night. As we left camp at 7am to get back to El Chalten before noon, the sun was just coming up over the mountains. With the clear skies we got to see what we'd missed the previous day.
Well except pink elephants of course.
So while the weather gods smiled once more for us, the ATM ones did not. But that's a story for another day.
No comments:
Post a Comment