Check out the clock - that's AM, folks.
Our guide showed up promptly at 2:30am to go over the schedule for the day. "It will take about 3 hours for the 2.7K to the summit, you will watch the sun rise, and then 5-6 hours for the Via Ferrata, and then we will be back here for second breakfast. After that maybe three hours to get down." Wait, WHAT? This could take another twelve hours? No one told me this would take another twelve hours, I had a massage appointment to get back for!
I'm only smiling on the outside.
And we were off.
It started out warm, and we had to go slow because were stuck in back of the big group of Taiwanese tourists, so it wasn't so bad at first. Then it started to get cold. And the wind began to blow. Then came the ropes, where you had to haul yourself over boulders. There was a full moon out, which was sort of pretty, not that you could see anything.
See the little lights? Those are the headlamps of the people behind us. My only comfort was that we were ahead of all of those people.
After a couple of hours it started to flatten out a bit, and then we were there! The summit! There wasn't much room at the top, and more people were coming, so we had to take a quick pictures and scramble down off the little peak again.
Not to be un-appreciative of all this natural beauty, but it was freakin' freezing waiting for the sun to rise. I wanted it to hurry up so we could get back down.
Woo hoo! The sun!
As we decided that we had officially seen the sun rise at 13,500 feel, we started to head back down. I can't tell you how great it was to take my first steps that were not up. And we could finally see all the stuff we missed on the way up.
I practically skipped my way down to the next meeting place, about 45 minutes down the mountain, not quite halfway to base camp. Next time - Via Ferrata, or, How Did I Get Talked Into This?
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