Our day begins at 5:45 am - we get up, make breakfast and organize before meeting our guide, Igor, for our hike.
We originally meet Igor on Day 281 through our guidebook, which gives directions to a nearby hostel that's popular with mountain climbers. We head there looking for trail maps but when we arrive, we discover that all that's left of the hostel are the burnt foundations. There was a fire in December, he tells us, and since then he and his girlfriend and their pets have been living on the grounds of the hostel, alternating between a tent (summer) and a mongolian ger (winter). He's philosophical about the loss of the building: "It's more important that everyone got out all right." Their set up is rustic but cozy and neat. Wildflowers are knee-high. A line of laundry hangs next to the fence that surrounds the property.
Our original plan - to simply pick up a map and find a few trails ourselves - changes drastically when we ask Igor this hypothetical question: "What kind of treks can be done in a day?" Igor traces it on our map: up one mountain to a lake above the tree line, then up and over into the mountain valley before heading back down, past a few waterfalls, to Arshan. He estimates it would take at least 10 hours, depending on the speed we hike.
And so our walk officially begins at 7:15 am. The first part of the trip is fairly gentle and we pass rivers and small waterfalls as we work our way up through the forest. Igor is just as much of a camera fanatic as Pierre is, and when he's not taking pictures he's enjoying the view (as he waits for us). The forest looks a lot like the forests we've seen in western Canada, only it feels bigger, somehow, and it has spiders that bite. Igor walks with a stick held up in front of him as though he's holding a flag in a parade. This, he explains, is to break the spider webs across the trail.
"If you break a web and a spider lands on you, it's better to do this" he says, and mimics picking up a spider gently from his neck, like a delicate berry, "rather than this." He mimics swatting his neck. "If you do that, it will bite you. You won't get sick but you won't feel very comfortable either." We let Igor keep the lead and leave him in charge of spider (re)location.
We keep a steady pace with only a few breaks to drink water and rest our legs, and it's almost noon by the time we finally get up past the tree line and stop for lunch on the shore of the lake.
Igor shares with us some of the local meat that he's brought with him and we share with him some of our dried fruit. During a stop to refill his water bottle in the lake, Pierre slips and soaks his feet. While planned dips in mountain lakes are generally better than unplanned, Pierre takes it pretty well, with only a bit of colorful accompanying language and some wry chuckles as he wrings out his socks and squeezes what water he can out of his shoes. After lunch, we head up to the ridge that leads into the mountain valley.
We stop there for about 30 minutes. Pierre would have stayed all day. The view is absolutely breathtaking. A crystal clear sky shining on a horseshoe shaped valley that opens out onto mountains as far as you can see on the horizon. The mountain meadow's lush green colour is dotted with spots of wildflowers and a few orange tents. A little river runs down one side of it and becomes a waterfall that we will see later on. It's hard to tear yourself away from that kind of splendor, but perhaps the experience is all the more precious for being brief. So we make our way down the lip of the bowl and Igor shows us how to hold our weight on the steep slope by digging our walking sticks into the loose stone and leaning onto them.
In the valley is a Russian yogi and a group of people joining her on her yoga retreat. Igor tells us that the yogi spends July to December of every year in this valley meditating (and doing yoga, I suppose). It's a lovely spot but full of blackflies - their legs and arms are covered with bites. I admire the group for putting up with the bugs. I, in my thoroughly un-zen state, spend the duration of our time in the valley rocking my walking stick back and forth in front of my body to keep the bugs from landing on me. The yogi and her friends don't swat at the bugs once.
A few of the yogi's guests are leaving today and they join us for the walk down. Veronica and Sergei have been in the mountain valley for two weeks.
"What do you eat up here?" I ask Veronica as we start walking down.
"Kasha," she says: buckwheat porridge. "Twice a day." Later on, they're both enthusiastic about a snack of dried fruit, bread and mutton that Pierre, Igor and I pool together during a break.
After a quick side trip to a waterfall (Igor tells us: "exclusive". Apparently not everyone gets to see this one, and we tend to agree as the scramble down the side of the cliff is pretty hairy at times) in a lower part of the valley, Igor finally leads us down the mountain towards town. The route is beautiful and the weather is great, but by about hour 10 of the walk, Pierre and I are pretty tired.
Unfortunately, we still have several more hours of walking to go before we can stop. By hour 11, I confuse being tired of walking with being tired of the mountain. By hour 12, I resent the mountain. There is swearing, mostly in my head.
The entire descent form the valley and at least 80% of our route is along rocky river banks which require a lot of clambering and balancing. As Pierre learned earlier, his shoes don't do well on wet rocky terrain and so he treads carefully. In combination with the fatigue, we're slower than we should be. We pass more waterfalls, stop for tea at a tent site with a friend of Igor's, do a few river crossings over some slippery logs and makeshift bridges and then pass more waterfalls. By the time we arrive back in town at around 8:30 pm, Pierre and I are both worn out. In total, we've walked some 24 kilometers. The sky is still light thanks to the long northern summer days - we visit with Igor for awhile in his yard, then head to a snack shop for a late dinner of borsch and meatballs and stumble home to bed.
The verdict: a beautiful, beautiful hike that I have no desire to repeat for a long, long time.
Photo credits: A big thanks to Igor for sending us the pictures that he took that day!
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