Up the mountain you go

Getting up at an hour earlier than the sun is the not the norm for me, but alas I was up at 4:00 at the latest on that Monday morning. No I hadn't slept that well, with my sleeping bag seemingly sliding downhill all night, I thought I might end up like Dan, outside of the tent looking at the stars. It was not warm when I arose, the semolina and egg was though, in a wierd way it was somewhat tasty, maybe because I was hungry so anything sounded ok at the time. Adrenaline kicked in quickly as Tim, Rach and I made sure that the expedition leaders were ready to roll for the day. The extreme group was prepping to climb a rather large summit, the next group was going to climb another rather large summit and the small summit people were going to climb a smaller summit. If you know me well I'm not a climber, camper, earlybird, hiker or outdoorsman hardly at all. I enjoy the outdoors but to an extent, a quite minute extent to be honest. Anyway we were off on a day long journey headed to a town and then up a mountain and back to the base. When arriving at the town an older gentleman invited us into his home, as you do in that area. We enjoyed some sweet tea, biscuits, more sweet tea, more biscuits and then thought that we should get hiking again. After attempting to leave he called us back to the living room because they were preparing lunch for us, 9:30 and we were going to eat a full meal, not bad for a hike. So there we were eating buttered noodles and drinking more tea, we were ready for the remainder of the hike.
The summit loomed ahead of our group, it wasn't ridicuously high, but to inexperienced climbers like most of us were it was a heck of a long way up a slippery slope of rock and sand. After much traversing we all made it to what we thought was the summit, it wasn't but in reality the actual summit was not that much more. We all made it officially to the top and then enjoyed a smallish lunch while enjoying the amazing view over the valley. Getting down was next on the agenda, to be honest I was worried about that part, if getting up was that hard how would we get down. Dave our trusty leader found a great path down a different face of the mountain and we all arrived safely at the bottom in all one piece. From there I had in my head that we were close to base camp, I was wrong by probably 4-5 miles since we walked for another 2-3 hours after I thought that we were close. You know how that is when you think that you are almost there, in reality we weren't even a few stones throw from the camp, as the crow flies we were miles away. The rest of the hike is not glamorous, just long, mostly uphill, across water at times, over rocks, and mentally battling being tired and wanting to relax. We made it and all crashed waiting for the other groups to arrive from their respective hikes. I was glad to be back, Rebecca and I had made it to the top, that was something for those of you who know how much of climbers and backpackers we are. I'll write more later about the remainder of the adventure to the mountains. later
earl