Never go to the mountains

Sincere recommendations from a participant in the Scarlet Sails hike July 19, 2009
Never! Never! Never go to the mountains!!! Even if tempting thoughts about an unusually romantic vacation suddenly creep into your head, throw them out of your head right now! You have no idea what you are dooming yourself to...

It all starts long before the hike itself. In the evenings, instead of other pleasant activities, you rush around the shops, visiting acquaintances and friends - buying camping equipment. Everything is very exciting and fun. You become the happy owner of the most wonderful things - a huge backpack, a headlamp, a special hiking mug (aka a mug) - about a liter and a half, and so on. and so on. Yes, and it would be nice to also buy poles - not ski poles, but mountain poles, special ones, they are needed in order to look like a real and dashing tourist on the rocks.

Then you take a short course as a young fighter - you learn to pack a backpack while still at home. It should contain only the essentials, and, moreover, properly laid and packaged. The process is fascinating, but after about two hours you realize that the “essentials” weigh about half a ton. Despite the most detailed and useful recommendations, you manage to cram so many things into your backpack that it’s already full, and you also have to carry food for six days in it.

Here begins a painful struggle for every “useful” thing. But it’s not so easy to break the spirit of a future mountaineering tourist. Tormented by the unknown - what really awaits you in the mountains? – you prefer not to take risks and take everything dear to your heart. A backpack filled with the most expensive things barely allows you to lift yourself off the floor, and so, not yet broken, you make your way to the train in short runs.

Arriving at the meeting place, you meet a dozen more of the same strange faces of the most varied (mostly cheerful) appearance, half of whom, like you, are on a hike for the first time. Trying unsuccessfully to wipe the embarrassed smile of a newcomer from your face, you are naively joyful, looking with emotion at how the food is distributed, and your lot falls to three or four kilograms of some strange packages, bags, cans, in a word, products that you last saw, much less cooked, in my opinion, in a past life. Daily bread is always more expensive, so with a sigh you lay out the bath salts and aromatic oil, making room for those terrible cans and bags. Now that's it! Well, your burning eyes, full of incredible hopes, are reflected as if in a mirror in a dozen pairs of the same ones, you are all in anticipation, your feet are beating a fuzzy rhythm - forward, my friend! Every fifth time you manage to throw the backpack on your back exactly the way it should hang there, you tighten the countless straps, adjust it - you don’t understand what... And then such a timid, sad guess creeps into your head - that’s it, there’s no going back, this backpack is on my back for six days - for six painfully long days.

You hobble cheerfully to the beginning of the route. Everyone is smiling. What did you know about the hike when you agreed to this adventure? Picturesque views, cheerful laughter, songs around the fire? All this will certainly happen! Only with one amendment... You went to the mountains, which means that there will be picturesque views only when you wipe the sweat from your eyes, cheerful laughter will smoothly turn into no less cheerful snoring at rest. Well, songs by the fire - first you need to persuade your biceps, triceps, quadriceps and other muscles (especially the brain) to get to this fire, and not let the minibus passing by tempt you with a quick deliverance from this nightmare.

I’m already silent about all sorts of little things - collecting firewood when there are only thorny bushes within a radius of one and a half kilometers, washing the pot when the rest of the dinner has firmly stuck to the bottom, waking up in the opposite corner of the tent, having lost another battle to a harmless sleeping bag, taking a nice invigorating shower from a two-liter bottle filled with well or spring (read ice-cold) water. In the evening, at the parking lot, you discover that you will have to cook dinner and breakfast, as well as wash the dishes and at least part of yourself, from a spring, dripping loudly, drop by drop. Sitting down on your backpack at a rest stop, you longingly imagine a sun lounger on the beach, polished by thousands of bodies. Dodging thorns and burrs, you gather a web over yourself, stretched, it seems, across all the mountains and forests of Crimea. On steep ascents and descents, you cling to the grass, stones and even the air, and for some reason it clearly sounds in your head: “Cursed be the day when I sat down at the steering wheel of this vacuum cleaner!”

But strange things happen to you on a hike.

Along with sweat in the mountains, your old skin slips off, and in the new you breathe greedily from every pore. And somewhere there, on these forest and mountain paths, in these impassable thorns, you slowly turn into - no, not into a brave “hiker” (as Olka said), but into a salty and ventilated piece of this wild nature.

Your backpack suddenly rests calmly and evenly on your shoulders, becoming closer to your back. With a slight movement of your hands (and also your feet), you break up a medium-sized woodpile for the evening fire. On the road, you now see not only the backpack and sneakers of the person walking under it, but you also manage to notice a bird, frozen at one point above the neighboring peak and holding the wind with its wing. A run of one and a half to two kilometers to the sea and back along the peaks and descents, and even after a day of hiking - solely for the sake of the bliss of swimming in the sea! - now only the instructor scares, but not you and the city kids like you.

In the evening, you don’t wander wearily into your tent, but wait patiently until some particularly romantic star falls from the night sky into your fire, and listen to the crickets sing along with a girl’s voice and guitar. The cheerful voice of the instructor at 07.00 is no longer a morning nightmare for you; on the contrary, you set the alarm clock for 05.00 and go smile at the sun, lazily creeping out from behind the mountains.

And when you get on the train on the way back, and the first hundred kilometers remain behind, you go for boiling water, brew the last two spoons of damp coffee in this very travel mug (aka cup) and quietly cry in the compartment over the bitter coffee aroma, and in it you smell the smell of dry grass, heated by the sun, and rotten leaves in the gorge, and you see the shadow of the clouds on the wooded slopes, and you hear the chirping of field grasshoppers, and friendly, causeless laughter, and an annoying ray of sun slips through, and a light mist of wind covers your peaks... and suddenly a thought flashes through your head - on your next trip you should definitely take an inflatable pillow, it will be more comfortable to sleep.

I sincerely and with all my heart advise - it’s better not to go to the mountains, because this disease cannot be treated.

Olga Prokopenko, Perm