19th - 2nd day in second trip

The goal today was to climb 700 meters to reach the summit of Mukal (3904m), a summit close by the camp and then return back to the camp to spend the second night there. Sounds easy enough, right?

The first 400 meters were relatively easy; ordinary mountain growth and a couple of rocks, and later plenty of snow. It wasn’t difficult in itself, just hard work.

What followed was a mountain side filled with rocks of varying sizes (small and large) that were piled among each other and seldom being very stable. No matter how stable a rock (even a huge one) looked, there was a high probability that it would move, tip or slide if you stepped on it (or just looked at it) in a wrong way. Add to that that the path up was steep and you had quite the nerve wrecking scenario for a couple of hours.

We finally made it to the top; rocks were still not very stable, not too much space to move around on and steep slopes to all sides made me sit down and enjoy the view far away and trying to ignore our – albeit picturesque – crazy situation. Despite being “only” 700 meters at noon I already felt exhausted. This was the first summit of our trip, but probably also the easiest.

After a short while we started getting ready for our descent. Luckily we did not take the same way down as we did up (that would have freaked me out even more than I already was), but instead we followed the mountain ridge for a while. This was the usual conditions along a very narrow path with steep slopes on both sides. After 10-15 minutes we stepped off and moved down the side towards the snow we started on in the morning. Getting down from here was much more fun than expected. The surface was fine loose gravel which we used to our advantage; we all got into almost touching distance of each other and the just slid down all the way. Basically we ended up going down almost 300 meters by riding a small local rock slide.

Coming back down to the snow we continued down and half an hour from camp we had lunch. After this break we came back to the camp at around 1430 and simply relaxed the rest of the day.

The weather in the afternoon and evening was worsened by the increased number of clouds gathering and passing through the camp, and also more windy (lying in the tent now it seems to have stopped blowing, though). Everyone has been wearing more clothes than usual.

Tomorrow we are moving the camp. Mostly a short day with app. 600 meters descent and app. 500 meter ascent spread out. We will according to plan arrive at our new camp site shortly after lunch.

Looking down at the lake you can just see the camp on the left side.

A quick break before continuing after the snow. Notice the size of the rocks - that was how it was all the way up.

The view from the top of Mukal.

Our mountain guide Max and tour guide Jakob during lunch.