A tryst with nature...

I guess it is high time I stop writing philosophy... Man, that is because I am happy... And no one writes philosophy while in high spirits...

So here I go with this blog about my date with nature! I never said I would be less poetic.

It was a five hour drive to the mountain range... Inyo National park... Driving, yet another of my passions, was painful that morning because of lack of sleep the previous night exacerbated by the early morning fog... It was about 8 a.m. when we reached the ranger station... We picked our camping passes and set off for the trailhead which was about 7 miles from the station. We were seven guys in all... grabbed some breakfast on the way to the trailhead... the route to the start of the trail was winding and getting us a little dizzy... At about eleven we got started on the trail... We set out to scale MOUNT LANGLEY, a majestic 14 er (14,047 feet) in the Sierra Nevada range.

The first day of the hike was to just get closer to the summit. We covered only one fourth of the total distance... Heavy backpacks, scorching sun and an apparent underestimation of the terrain had gotten us tired... We decided to camp by one of the four lakes... of course, by now you would have guessed... we camped by the lake that was closest to the summit...

The water in the lake was chill and refreshing... The fine texture of the lake bed was soothing to the foot... The places where the texture changed from being fine to being coarse gave some good acupunture treatment to the sore legs... Crystal clear water, clear blue skies, Mt. Langley in the backdrop and a few scattered palm trees gave the place an ethereal touch... After a light lunch and a mid day siesta, four of us left the camp to find out about the trail to follow. We had been lucky the first day because we used a marked and maintained trail. We discovered only late in the evening about what lay in store for the next morning...

We were supposed to take the old army pass... a jigsaw puzzle would have any day been better to solve than to figure out where the pass was... Fortunately with some wrong way of map reading (with a compass of course) and some guidance from fellow hikers who were faced with the same daunting task, we were able to find it... The remainder of the day was rather smooth, but for the fact that we got lost for an hour before being able to find out the way to the camp!

The next morning, we left the camp at around 5:00 in the morning... We were at an elevation of 10,000 feet then... and were all set to brave the Old Army Pass, the heat and the herculean 14 er... We reached the foot of the old Army pass only to discover that it was a beast... The switchbacks drove us crazy... Heavy backpacks, sharp and steep switchbacks made us scamper our way up the passs... Once up there it was rather flat... But the forks in the path put us in a spot of bother time and again... As the saying goes "All roads lead to Rome", all these forks still led us to the same place... We lesser mortals did not realise this until some wisecrack in the team asserted it...

We realized that the Old Army pass had been a lot gentle to us when we reached the foot of the summit... We literally had to do rock climbing... A couple of wise people left their heavy backpacks and loaded themselves with only fluids and energy shots... It took six energy shots for a guy before he made it to the summit... Six out of seven penned our names in the summit register at 10:30 a.m. ... Well, to do some justice to the name of the post, let me make a remark here: It was beautiful from up there... :)

The way back was downhill and was a piece of cake... We reached the camp at around 1:00 p.m... After a short while of rest, we resumed our journey back to the trail head... The total hike was for 24 miles... One hell of a trip... But the best thing about it was that we tamed a 14er... Awaiting to have more 14ers in the bag and more posts in the blog...