The Great Misadventure

I know I'm posting this really late. And it's the longest travelogue yet. Friday, after hanging out with the kids at the burn clinic, Ben and I headed back to the apartment. Eva had gone home early or stayed home because she didn't feel well. On the way we stopped at the CineCenter food court. We enjoyed surprisingly good calzone-esque things, oblivious that the coming night would be one of the most harrowing of our lives. At the apartment Ben and I decided to go hiking in the afternoon near a place I had previously hiked for an hour or so with Eva and the med students. Since we went straight from there to the mountains, I never had a chance to pick up my flashlight, jacket, or Gondorian horn from the guesthouse. But I probably wouldn't have brought them anyway because we planned on hiking up to a certain pyramid-like mountaintop in the distance in about four hours and hiking back down a ridge into the city in another two, being back in time for dinner. Our taxi got stuck on the rocky road up to the Tunari national park, but otherwise we started without hindrance or premonition. We stayed on the course the rest of us had previously traversed for about five minutes, and the cut across some hillside fields out of the national park and into the wild. This first hour or so was an amazing hike, especially since we weren't carrying anything except two bottles of water and a cell phone. It was a narrow horse trail cut into the side of the steep mountain, with a spectacular view into the narrow valley between the next mountain and us. A misplaced step and we'd take a twenty-minute tumble reminiscent of Hot Rod. This trail ended in a huge amount of stones piled against a huge rock face. With each step across, we started a small avalanche. It was exhilarating. My mind did not wander to what it would be like to cross this only by limited moonlight, wondering if the next step would send me crashing down, or sleeping with these rocks digging into my body, constantly readjusting my feet and finding new handholds in the sparse vegetation, trying to rest while unaware of the length of the fall in the darkness beneath me. We decided to climb down the rock pile to the very small stream at the core of the valley and pull ourselves up the short cliffs to the forest on the land perched thirty feet above the rest of the valley between the two major ridgelines. We hiked up that way for a while, finding a water pipe and following its path. At one point someone had drilled or knocked a hole in the pipe and lodged a twig in, diverting a small stream and creating a pool. Our water bottles were already depleted, and we made the not-so-difficult choice to replenish. The cold water running down the mountain was refreshing. A few minutes later, we found a small metal door in the side of the mountain and entered the tunnel. There were what looked like a few hiking sticks on the ground, and thirty feet inward, a gap in the floor where a mountain stream flowed. It reminded me of Bilbo and the dwarves entering Mirkwood, and in the dark tunnel of trees finding a small dark stream that caused paralyzing lethargy. Fearing we would be sucked into the same fate as Bombur, we retreated back into the sunlight and left the realm for future exploration. Some ways past here, the trail dissolved and we faced steep, rocky walls all ahead. Instead of backtracking to find another way, we scaled the cliffs. They were constantly crumbling, and more than once alarm shot through my body as a handhold gave way and rolled to the valley below. We pulled ourselves up to a ridge covered in feathers, and vulture-like hawks flew near our heads. We added these feathers to the growing collection of bright mountain flowers in my backpack, as proof that we had been there, and a rite of passage, like Bruce Wayne. As we conquered this crest of earth, like many following it, we saw that the pyramid-shaped mountaintop above us was still quite a hike away. Doubt of success grew as we crossed from thickly bushed hills into mountaintop forest in the setting sun. At this point, we were at the crest of a mountain still some ways off from the elusive pyramid, and decided to head back down the ridgeline that we were on, hoping to follow it straight into the city. Here, at our highest point, lightheaded from altitude, but victorious, and with that feeling you get when you're somewhere few people have gone before, we saw an old woman, with a big sack across her back climbing up to a house on the next ridge. Oh well. We half-ran down the wooded ridge for a while, but the underbrush increased until we decided to continue down in the small creek in the valley. While traversing downstream we passed a huge mountain of rocks on our left side. The next day we realized this was what we climbed down hours before after the first trail ended. But we kept going down the streambed, pushing through thick underbrush until the stream dropped at least fifty feet, which was unclimbable. We pulled ourselves up the steep hill above it by the thick weeds covering it, into the woods on the ridge. At this point the only light we had to navigate by was the moon. After going downward a few minutes, we ended up looking down cliffs on both sides, coming to a V in front of us. A narrow dirt wall continued at the point of the V towards the city, with at least a thirty foot drop on both sides. It was about a foot thick, and I straddled it and shimmied down to see if it gradually descended into the valley, but it dropped off abruptly at the end. It was extremely daunting to slowly turn myself around at the end to crawl back up to the land. This marked the beginning of the demoralizing wandering journey back up the mountain to find another way down. While we were within cell service range, we called and let Eva know we wouldn't be making it to dinner, but should be back late that night. The altitude and toil of the day was taking its toll on me, and sometimes I had to make Ben stop his young whippersnapper pace every twenty or thirty feet to take a break. Soon we rediscovered the water pipe and followed it up the mountain, until we came upon the same hole in the pipe as earlier in the daylight, and realized we were somehow on the same mountain as before, not on a different ridge as we thought. While following the pipe downhill, Ben in front using the cell phone as a flashlight, I slipped off an edge I had not noticed in my miserable exhausted stupor. During the split second I was falling, I imagined one of the hundred-foot drops we witnessed that day, but I was immediately caught face-first in thorn bushes. After extracting myself, I hurried to catch up down the pipe to Ben. Ten minutes later, the path narrowed at a particular point, and I couldn't see well, and I stepped off the side. I fell backwards about twenty feet. It was just a blur of motion, and the scratch of tree branches against my back and arms, and then the impact. It was a soft blow, because of all the tree branches I had caught under me, and it just knocked the wind out of me. Disoriented, I stared at an upside down waterfall, wavering in the moonlight, which lightly sprayed me with water. The otherwise tranquil predicament was spoiled by Ben yelling and me assuring him I was alright. After the muddy climb back up to the trail, we continued for quite a while until we reached the giant rock pile for the third time that day, but this time we realized we were on the trail home. The stones seemed a lot less stable in the dark, and the reality of crashing down to the bottom under a pile of rocks appeared a lot more probable. We had just talked to Eva on the dying cell phone and said we would call back and assure her we were on our way in five minutes. However, after making it across the rocks to the vegetated side, we couldn't find the trail back to the city anywhere. We thought the trail might be perched on a rock wall above our heads, so Ben pulled himself up by the weeds and started to climb the cliff. I was really tired and sat on rocks with my legs jammed against a tree, nodding off. I heard a yell and looked up to see Ben falling. Both his handholds and a foothold had given way at the same time. He tumbled down the hill of stones, limbs flailing, a cloud of dirt in his wake. He tumbled past me, just out of my reach, and into the darkness below. Then the sounds of tumbling and skidding stopped. It was the most sudden, disconcerting, frightening thing I've seen in person. As I was screaming his name, he yelled up that he was alright, which filled me with relief. He had fallen against a tree and caught it under his arm, scraping up his whole side and tricep. Half an hour later I slid down to where he was. I estimate he plummeted around 40 feet. He had lost his debonair fedora and broken his watch. We didn't have cell phone signal anymore, so we never called Eva back like we told her we would. It was now after midnight and we had been hiking ten hours. We realized we would keep falling if we kept exploring in the dark, so we stayed the night right there on the rock hill. The night up in the mountains was freezing, and we weathered it in just shorts and t-shirts. We slept cuddled up for warmth on the large rocks, with our heads under long overhanging blades of a mountain weed. I'm not sure why, I guess as protection from cold winds. I was too uncomfortable to sleep very much, and I was afraid I would shift or roll or lose my footing and roll down to the stream below. The next morning we woke with the sun and forced ourselves to get up in the freezing dawn air, to find we had slept ten feet away from the path, which took us back to suburbs of the city in an easy, 45 minute stroll. It was an awesome hike, with a panoramic view of the city, which was half in bright sunlight and half in shadow cast by the mountains. We walked into the city and took a cab to their apartment, arriving after 8, where we found out that Eva had called the rescue team to find us, but they had been searching the wrong mountain. In reflection, I see the grace and protecting and sustaining power of God in the excursion. There were so many instances in which we would not have made it back safely or maybe even survived if everything had not happened exactly how it happened. We both fell probably the most dangerous falls of our lives, but without serious injury, we happened to stumble across a landmark that showed us where we were, and we wouldn't have been able to keep going if the perfectly placed holes in the water pipe hadn't come to us at the exact moments they did. Thanks be to God