Elevation gain: 4700’ to 7600’ (+2900’)
Estimated distance: 16km
Time: 7am-4pm
Today happens to be our 1 year wedding anniversary. Seems a bit superfluous here. It is only our second true day of hiking, and already our thoughts are consumed by it - hike, eat, sleep, do it all again. The land is so vast here, mountains so high, yet hidden by foothills so steep we still cannot even see them, and there is still so much ground to cover. We ate breakfast with our friends Raz and Ofer, and telling them it was our anniversary Ofer asked if Griffin got me a gift. We giggled, saying the trip to these mountains was our mutual gift. Although with all the sweating and hard hiking a "gift" was maybe not the right word...
Still feeling happy about the day and the trail...until it got steep, really steep. And then, after going up for almost 2000’ in elevation, we saw the town of Tal, at least 1500’ feet below us. It was all up and down for almost nothing.
This trek is teaching me patience. We go up and down and up and down, all day, which fights my intuition that we are supposed to be climbing, up to a pass, and that means we should never be descending. It is good practice.
We are also learning that the trail in some cases is a muddy path, in some it is a river bed with stepping stones, and in some cases, stone steps carefully laid by the Nepali, as this trail is also a donkey and travel route for them to get from village to village.
For most of the day the trail was of good footing, until the end. The area we were to walk was very narrow, only a few inches cut into the side of the rock, with a 200’ drop down one side into the river. While 200’ is not that high (compared to people who are summiting the peaks around us who have 6000’ drops), it was still a little unnerving.
We stopped for the night at a nice place in Danakyu and watched a thunderstorm form right over our heads from the nearby mountain peaks. From here we also got our very first views of the snow capped mountains. After dinner when we returned to our room and turned on the lights we were confronted by two very large and not fun spiders on the ceiling. The fear of one of them walking on my face in the night was too much, so Griffin scared them back into the ceiling area and taped up the opening through which they had emerged. The night passed without incident.
