Hello everyone!! Guess what!? This post is finally not about my south island trip, I thought I would never finish tell you about it! Well actually be prepared to hear more when I get home, it was such a good trip! After I got back I had quite a lot of work to do. I had to finish all of my finals and it was pretty rough but I got it done! So then it was time for the adventures to begin again. I was off to the Tongariro Crossing with a bunch of friends.
And this was our sweet ride. It's the nicest mini van rental in the world. Automatic doors, stereo system, and it just looks really nice! We drove about 4 hours down to the national park and got there at about midnight then proceeded to cook dinner. Needless to say, it was a pretty late night and a very early start.
Here was our first glimpse of Mt Ngauruhoe (or for Lord of the Ring fans- Mt Doom).
And here it is, the extremely long hike we were about the endure! Our plan was to finish the whole crossing in addition to making one of the two summits. We figured out it would take about 10 hours.
I decided my mission for the trip was to carry around this stick I found for the whole hike. And on the way I picked up some trash I found! A pretty cool hobby, I know.
Our little hiking team!
LET IT SNOW!!!! It was so crazy that there was still snow. We got to have a good snow ball flight and everything!
After about 3 hours we came to the crazy summit. As a team we decided to attempt to summit Mt Ngauruhoe. It was the craziest crazy thing I've ever done in my life. It's an old volcano so it's just ash and rocks, literally you are climbing the side of a mountain. As you can see we were crawling up! I was enjoying the good work out until I would look to the sides once we were half way up. I had never felt like I could just fly off the side of a mountain before since there are always trails and trees. But if you slipped a bit you could just fall down the whole mountain- SO SCARY. Then the wind picked up and the clouds were moving in, then it became extremely windy. Everyone was extremely encouraging, which was great. A third of the group stopped half way up, another third had already made it to the summit and the middle group that I was in was team working up the mountain. At one point, my friend did start to slip and I had to catch her foot and hold there until we were regrouped. Basically, I'm pretty sure I was climbing Mt Everest.
About 5/6 up to the summit I got really scared of the wind, falling off a mountain, large rocks tumbling down the side of the mountain (they actually were at this point) so I needed to stop. I pushed myself pretty far I thought since I had been scared for a while. This is my little safe keeping rocks! I positioned myself behind two tiny rocks to block the wind. There was a bigger rock little enclosure about 50 feet below me but I was too scared to go down alone. And here I waited probably 40 minutes for people to make it to the top and come back to where I was to help me back down.
But here is the amazing view I got to see. I don't think I have ever been that high up while hiking, and if I have I've never had that sorta climbing hike before.
Eventually, people came back down and my friend Manuel held my hand and helped me down the rest of the mountain. He really is my savior! When we got to s certain part down it was pretty fun because you could just dig your heels in and jump down. But up until that point it was the scariest thing of my life.
When we all got to the bottom we decided to go back the way we had come since it was getting really late and we knew that route wasn't too hard. All of our legs barely worked though, there was a lot of grunts of pain when we had to step down.
In the end, I'm so happy I went on this trip I really pushed my limits and tried something totally different and amazing!
Hope you find something that is terrifying to you this weekend and go out and do it! If you believe in yourself you can!
Love and miss you all,
Michele
No comments:
Post a Comment