The Climb!!!

We did it!!! We conquered one of the highest mountains in our area (and we have the soreness to prove it, haha). Even though it's probably one of the hardest (physical) things we've ever done, we enjoyed it overall. It was a great experience, and thankfully we had a good (patient) guide with us.

PS - This might be a long post with lots of pictures. We didn't include all of them, of course, but just click on the link to the left for the rest of the pictures. We've posted them on Shutterfly.

On the way up there (it's a 2 hr. drive from where we live) - we stopped to get some clear pics of the mountain before climbing. It's a good thing that we did, because coming home the mountain was all covered in fog/mist.





Justin proudly pointing out the trail! A mere 8.7 KM to the top, not knowing of the grueling ascent ahead ;)







At this point, we had just started, and so we took our time while taking pictures along the way. Needless to say, on the way down, we did NOT take our time and we tried to go as quickly as possible!

Some of the pretty scenery along the way, along with interesting animals. This being some type of squirrel. Quite friendly, and he really liked our friend's peanuts. He came right up to us.

These pics here are a rare sight. One of the guides ahead of us with another group pointed out this monkey in the trees. We're glad he did, because we sure weren't looking up. Our guide said it's difficult spotting these monkeys because they hardly ever come around near the path.

Wooohooo, almost to the lodge for the resting point. After the first day's hike, we stayed at a lodge 6KM up. The next day at 3 AM!!!! the rest of the hike to the peak continues along with going down the whole way that 2nd day. So on the 2nd day we totaled around 9-10 hours of hiking to get to the peak and then all the way back down again.






We call this our "Lord of the Rings" picture. Kind of looks like a scene out of one of those movies. The higher we climbed, the more drastically our scenery changed. We went from tropical rain forest, to this shrubbery, to eventually granite only!




A group shot with the guide as we were nearing the lodge to rest for the semi-night.







This was a VERY welcome sight by the time we reached it after 5 1/2 hours of hiking uphill! There are no pictures the next morning of the climb, since it was still dark and we were using flashlights. We did get some nice sunrise pictures from the top along with a view of the valley around us.















Yeah, it was THAT cold! At least to us, all of you readers who live in sub-zero snow much of the year would have thought this was a warm day :) haha. The wind is what was really bad and made it seem so much colder. We were able to shed some layers as we headed back down.




We were VERY grateful for those ropes. It doesn't look too tough in the picture, but they sure came in handy (especially at 90 degree angled cliffs!!).





Another view of the edge of the mountain. If you look closely you can see people still coming up for the rest of the hike. We didn't feel too bad not being in the front, at least we weren't last! They do have races at this mountain once a year, and there are actually people who make it up this mountain and back down in under 3 hrs. We thought that was pretty crazy, but maybe we're just that much out of shape, lol!



We had to document the temp at the lodge after we got back from the early morning climb. When we left at 3am it was at 7 degrees C, but had moved up a couple degrees. At the top of the mountain it was way colder, of course no thermometer to prove that ;) This is the coldest it must ever get in a tropical area!