Hiking!
Hi everybody!
On Monday which was Labor Day we went hiking! It was crazy!!!!!!!! It was a four hour hike and it was so much fun, but also really scary. I was tired after only a few meters because of the elevation as were the people who were not from here. We went with our family (except for Chase) and a few of their friends and neighbors with their families, there were also four missionaries that came with us. After a while we came to a super steep hill and some of us decided to go around (which would take longer), so as stupid as I am I decided to take the extremely steep way because it was shorter and it looked like more fun. It was the scariest thing I have ever done in my life! We were so high up and I knew that if I fell I would have died. So one of the missionaries had to hold my water bottle for me so that I could use both my hands and one of the moms climbed behind me and kind of told me what to do. It is sooo embarrassing, but I hadn’t been that high up before and it was seriously scary. I had really low blood sugar when we got up to safety, so one of the moms who is a nurse gave me an energy bar so that I would survive the rest of the way. So we continued on a path up the mountain and it was hard! The air was thin, it was warm and exhausting, but I was totally in survival mode the whole way so I didn’t feel how hard it was to actually walk. I just focused on getting to the top and not falling, so I didn’t look down much while we were walking. I was also scared that I would push myself to hard and faint so someone always walked behind me (also super embarrassing). We met some people who were hiking down instead of up as we did and I would not want to do that, I think you feel safer going up instead of down. It was soooo beautiful in the mountains, it really was an amazing experience and it was so much fun. It felt like you were in a movie when you were climbing up the hills and over the mountains. Everyone else drank about one bottle of water the whole way, I drank almost three! When we were an hour or something away from the peak we had lunch, we had made turkey sandwiches for everyone. The last part was the hardest because it was very steep and the mountain was covered with like sand or something and there were loose rocks. I ran the last and not that steep part though it was only like 10- 20 meter or so left. It felt great!!! And at the top you could see the whole way we had hiked and just the feeling that I had made it was awesome! The peak that we hiked was 3,353 meter which is one of the highest one in that area and the highest peak in Sweden is around 2,100. We stayed at the top for a little while to take pictures and then we took the tram down and so we could take really good pictures of the path we had taken. When we got down we all went and got doughnuts and slushes. I was a truly fantastic day!
The first picture is of all of the girls about 20 min into the hike.
Here is the hill we climbed up! As you can see there are two people at the bottom who are taking the other way around. You can't really tell how steep it is from the picutre you kind of have to see it in reality. Then there is a picture of the whole group walking towards the next hill.
On the first picture above you can see something at the top of the mountain, that is the tram so that is where we were going. But we had to walk criss cross over the mountain to get there.
Then here we are when we are taking our lunch break. On the picture to the left with the woman in a blue shirt you can see the tram again (our destination).
This is taken from the peak and this is the path we took, at the top of the mountain that is closest in the picture.
In the picture to the left is my host mom Tori and her friend, that was taken in the beginning of the hike. Then the last one is of me and two other girls at the peak.
- Denise
