Beautiful, a nice view of the lake, the town, the surrounding mountains; I was taking it all in untill...bark bark bark. I had the atttention of the neighborhood canine community. So I went on the retreat turning ack toward what I believed to be the way I came. Wrong. Before I knew it I was at a dead end. There was one medium sized dog that looked like a large coyote and behind a flimsy short fence a rottweiler and some other beast who seemed to be following the lead of the coyote, as if if the coyote decided to he could summon them both with one howl. I retreated into a wood and the dog stopped at the edge. He wasn´t going to attack, but neither was he going to leave. He backed down a bit and stopped barking so I decided to go for it. I picked up a large stick and went forth. As soon as I hit the street I turned right back around. I was stuck. Behind me was somewhat of a cliff that dropped into a thick pine forest. I spotted a ledge seven or so feet below me and slid down to it. I spent the next half hour descending into what ended up to be a pine grove so dense that I could hardly see. Long story short, I paused to let my eyes adjust to the light, enraged two other dogs and ended up in someones back yard on a highway that I walked into town. I got to hike after all...
That evening I grabbed a litre of beer and went to the shore to watch the sunset
Later that night I grabbed a bottle of wine and went back to the hostel where I met a guy from Berlin named Nils. We decided to climb a mountain the next day. And that was what we did. We hit the trail at about 8:30 at an elevation of about 700ft.
Behind Nils there is the low mountain that we had to go around and over to get to our destination, a valley at about 6500 feet, four hours away...at least.
Here she is behind me in the distance
Two hours later we were both quite hungry and hadn´t reached our lunch spot yet, a small shelter at the mouth or our valley
We finally got there and had lunch: cheese, sausage, bread and chocolate. It took this shot from the rock we had lunch on.
Beautiful. We then decided to scale those mountains out there in the distance. And though the valley, the lagoon to be more specific doesn´t look that big, it really is. We were pretty sure that up over ridge there in the left of the picture there was another lagoon. There was only one way to find out so off we went. Follow the water...
...and sure enough, we found the second lagoon. It was frozen solid. Here you can see the frozen lagoon on the far left and in the distance the first one where I had lunch.
We went on a ways. Up and towards the center of the mountains as seen from that photo taken from the lunch spot
Then we took another break. While we were relaxing and sharing a chocolate bar I spotted an Andean condor. It was hanging out on the other side of the valley, to our right. I can´t desribe the gracefulness of that bird or the peace that it brought over me that afternoon. Once it disappeared in distance we knew I was time to go. It would take about five hours to get back to the trail head. So down we went
A few thousand feet down we were once again in the forest. An autumn sunset accompanied us on our way back to civilization.
We made it to the bus stop at dusk. I showered, ate a steak and went to sleep. I had climbed my first mountain.
Tomorrow I am off to Chile. Vilicaria, Chile to be precise. Gonna hang out with the sea lions for a couple of days. Cheers!
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