Wilderness Adventures
I haven't blogged in a while, and many things happened since my last post. Most notably, I've come home to Brasov for my summer vacation, and I've started taking driving lessons. :)
But that's not what this blog is about: it's about some [unplanned] adventures I've had part of. It all started on Friday, when Adina, my girlfriend, came to visit me in Brasov. We went hiking in the Piatra Mare mountains. This is usually an easy trail. It's so easy, we left for the mountains at noon (this is very late for this kind of trips).
As we lazily approached the mountain, everything looked fine, even slightly boring. But little did we know of the things that were about to happen. We started climbing, and soon we reached the Piatra Mare chalet (the small, new chalet, built near the ruins of the 20 years old ruins of the original chalet).
As we still had time, we continued our journey to the peak. I wanted us to get to that peak since during my previous trips to the Piatra Mare mountains I had been lazy enough not to go further than the chalet.
Shortly after, we reached the top of the mountain (1844 meters above sea level). The view was superb; we could see all the mountains around us: the Ciucas mountain, the Baiului mountains, the Bucegi mountains, and the Postavaru mountain. The weather was fine too, although in the morning it seemed that it would rain.
This is where things started to go wrong. Since we could see the Bucegi mountains so clearly, and I knew that the Brasov - Bucharest road was passing below us, we thought we could get off the mountain by going directly downhill, without following any footpath, straight through the woods.
There were several things wrong with that decision: (1) neither of us had a watch, and we didn't know that it was already 7 o'clock in the afternoon, and (2) we had underestimated the difficulties this mountain could present.
As we climbed down the mountain, we started thinking of the wild animals that we might encounter: bears, wolves, boars, etc. I had even seen some boar tracks, but I didn't think it was a good idea to scare Adina for nothing.
Our goal was to get to the road by daylight. The problem was that the more we went, the steeper the mountain became, and, soon enough, the sun begun to set. I suggested we should keep on descending, since if we'd keep going to lower and lower altitudes, we were bound to find the road.
This policy worked fine for a while, until we realized that we were nowhere near the road. Our morales started to drop slowly, as we saw the sun going closer and closer to the horizon. We started following a valley, knowing that all streams flowing from Piatra Mare converged on the small river flowing by the road we wanted to reach.
A wave of optimism hit us when we started hearing the cars and the trains that were circulating on the road. That optimism faded as we descended to the bottom of the valley, and the sounds stopped reaching us. After each curve of the valley we hoped to see the road, but every time, there was another curve, another slope, another obstacle.
As we got lower and lower, the valley stopped being dry, as now we were walking in a small [ but increasing ] water stream. The valley became deeper and deeper in mountain, and the walls on the sides of the stream became steeper and steeper. It looked like the little had carved in the mountain a not-so-little canyon, and this was not good news.
At this point we were already tired, dirty and scared. What started as a simple walk in the woods had become one of the most dangerous trips I've ever been into. At every step we needed to hang to the roots and branches of the trees, not to fall down the ever steeper slope.
When we saw that it was almost dark, we both panicked and decided to walk directly through the water, hopping we'll get to the road faster. This was an unfortunate decision, since we both got our feet wet, and we slipped, hurting ourselves. Since by now it was outright night, we decided it wasn't worth risking life and limb to reach the road in the darkness, especially since we had only one flashlight and we had managed to get to the border of a precipice, so we started preparing to spend the night in the woods.
At this point, I would like to thank $DEITY for keeping us alive through the night, because I cannot imagine how we could have survived otherwise. We had no special equipment for sleeping outdoors, since this trip was meant to be a one-day trip. I am still amazed how lucky we were during the night: there was no rain, there was no wind, there was no bear, no wolf, no boar to disturb us. The only problem we had to worry about was hypothermia, and we managed to maintain our body heat thanks to our Polartek equipment. [ From now on, I'm not spending another dime on sleeping bags; it's Polartek all the way, baby ;-) ].
At that moment we started worrying of what our parents would think. I was certain my mother had panicked and called everybody she knew to help us. [ As I later found out, my presumptions were accurate. ] As we waited for the dawn to break, we would periodically hear people calling us, but those were only illusions.
Slowly, time passed, and morning came. We then realized to what danger we would have exposed ourselves to, had we tried to continue in the dark: we were on the edge of a precipice. It took us almost an hour to get out of the valley we had managed to get stuck into, and we decided never to follow any stream again, fearing we would encounter more canyons and waterfalls.
Nevertheless, our spirits were now high, since we knew we had more than 12 hours of daylight ahead of us, and that seemed like more than enough to find a road we could now hear roaring just a few hundred meters ahead of us. And indeed, being able to see where we were going, it was easier to navigate around the forest. Another hour later, we were walking on the road that seemed to be hidding from us a night before.
We called home, only to find my mother crying. She had been so scared that she didn't even think of punishing us for our recklessness.
As a conclusion, I'm happy that Adina and I are both alive and that we didn't break any limb. Remember kids, don't step away from the footpath unless you really know what you're doing. And even if you do (as I though I did), don't.
Thanks for reading...
