Our pre-trip research has turned up some amazing multi-day treks in some of the countries we’ll be visiting. One of the most extreme has to be the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. The trek is 17 to 21 days long, covers roughly 186 miles and takes you up to nearly 18,000 feet.
Anjel and I are enthusiastic and in pretty good shape, but the one things we don’t have is much hiking and camping experience. Enter our good friend and wilderness enthusiast, Michael Yap. We’d been talking about going camping with him and his wife for sometime and finally set a date. Catching the last few days of REI’s big sale, Anjel and I spent an epic 5 hours in the Berkeley strore, trying on packs and boots. The pack department guy was unbelievably helpful and we walked out with two Osprey packs, two sleeping bags and a brand new pair of boots for me.
The next morning we left the house at 5:30 to pick up Michael and Christine and drove down to Big Sur (with a brief stopover at Monterey’s Dennis the Menace Park).
The hike was amazing! Though it started with a steep, quarter-mile ascent right out of the gate, it settled back to a consistent but manageable ascent. The trail was only a little over 3 miles but gained about 1100 feet (335m) in elevation over that distance. It took us almost 4 hours to make the campsite – which sounds ridiculously slow, but included a few short rests (including a break to use the filter to refill the CamelBaks from a stream), not to mention the 25lbs of gear we were each carrying.
Once we got to the campsite we broke out the tents, gathered firewood for the night and started a fire for dinner. Though Michael brought some freeze dried camp food, we also splurged (in terms of weight) and brought 2 packs of sausages, 6 eggs (for breakfast) and graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate for s’mores.
The night was uneventful. The sleeping bags we purchased were plenty warm, and though Michael was kind enough to loan us a set of basic sleeping pads, it became clear that something lighter and more comfortable would be a big help. While Anjel and I shared a 2-man tent, Christine went solo in a 1-man tent as Michael had been wanting to try sleeping under the stars in just his bag. Though he admitted to some concern about bugs, the next morning he declared the experiment a full success.
Anjel scrambled up some eggs for breakfast and after some coffee and hot chocolate we broke camp and headed back down. We took the same path out, though this time it took us only 2 hours to make it back to the car. All in all the weekend was a fantastic trial run. The packs were amazingly comfortable and the boots (which I had purchased the day before) worked great. About 2 hours into the hike up I had started to feel some rubbing on my left little toe (completely expectable with new boots) but a quick stop to wrap it with some toe tape got me all the way up to camp (& back down) with no troubles.
