Elevation gain: 11,023’ to 11,614’ (+575’); up to 15,000’ at Ice Lake (+/- 4,000’)
Estimated miles: 10km
Time: 9am-3:30pm
We slept in until 6:30am and after a nice fulfilling breakfast, Griffin thought it would be a good idea to hike to Ice Lake. We had seen some signs in town (ie chalk boards) advertising that Ice Lake is a great acclimatization hike, and that is offers spectacular views of the upper Himalayan range.
Seeing that I had been having some trouble adjusting to the altitude, we decided this would be the hike for us. Rather than do a day trip, with light day packs, which we figured would be wussing out, we brought our full packs. And started the hike at 10:30am. Well what a great idea this was. First of all, the trail went just straight up the side of the mountain, in endless switchbacks. It made Ghyaru look like a walk in the park. Secondly, we started late in the day and were told it was a 6hr hike with no packs, so we were clearly feeling the need to rush. And we had little water. All in all, it sounded like the start of so many of our great adventures.
True to form, the views were amazing. The part that we found the most incredible is that the higher we hiked, the bigger the mountains seemed. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? The mountains seems more tame and manageable as one climbs higher? Not here, these are unprecedented behemoths.
The hike to Ice Lake started to get really rough around 13,900’. I had been doing just fine, with only a slight headache, until we started pressing 14,000’. Just a bit after that we came across the first of the two “ice” lakes, after being told we were “badass” by a guy from LA (because we had our full packs). The lakes were not yet frozen over, and were not quite as cool as we had hoped after the serious uphill effort. We kept going to the next lake, only 5 minutes away, when Griffin started getting a headache too. By now my headache was pounding so loud I couldn’t hear much else, and I was started to get nauseous. These are symptoms of serious altitude sickness, and I knew we had to go down. A quick view of the lake and off we were. Later we were to find that Griffin’s altimeter, telling us it was only 14,100’, was incorrect - it was more like 15,000’. We had ascended almost 4,000’ in less than 4 hours. Not too smart. But realizing the danger we decided to not filter water at the lake and just get down, another not so smart idea.
Around 13,500’ we started to feel a bit better, and we able to pick up the pace of our descent. We even heard an avalanche on the far mountain slopes. The trail that had been so hard to climb up proved even worse going down. The hiking poles we had offered little solace to our knees, which were just shot. But we needed water and were racing the sunset so down and down we went. We arrived back to Braka about 1 hour before dark, and decided to head up to Manang, a very large village like Chame, and stay for the night. We knew our friends, who we had not seen since Chame, would be there, among others.
We stayed at an overpriced and underaccomadating tea house, but Raz and Ofer were there as well as many other Israelis. It was nice to be in the company of others again. Our heads continued to pound even after we were rehydrated, so an Advil again was called to help. I realized our little day trip may have been a bit much to handle with such full packs, but oh well.
A nice candle lit dinner with an undercooked Yak burger set the tone for the night, which ended in a game of chess.