My first hike in the mountains
May 17th, 2024
Students of my university organized one and I was invited, there were 9 of us. It was an EXPERIENCE. Never had hiked before. Bought a hiking backpack, borrowed a tent, sleeping bag and pad from friends. I also bought military MREs for me and my best friend, but apparently we weren't hungry enough for them to become edible... dumped them right into the trash.
We took a long-distance train to a town called Goryachy Klyuch. The train went all night long, we arrived in the morning, had breakfast and set off.
My backpack ended up weighing around 14 kilograms, I thought I would die carrying it up the mountains, I'm small.. But it was actually very fun. My backpack is good for distributing the weight more or less evenly on the back, so my shoulders didn't hurt, but every easiest and mundane action turned into a fun physical challenge. A simple act of walking becomes engaging, as balancing yourself gets much more difficult.
My favorite things to do with a heavy backpack were: 1) crossing a mountain stream by walking on stones. the stones are wet and slippery. one wrong move and you're in the water. 2) climbing over fallen trees.
I thought everything (walking with a lot of weight, setting up a tent, etc) is going to be much harder, but every single thing that I feared turned out to be really easy and exciting.
Our destination was a small waterfall with some tiny caves deep in the woods. We built our camp on top of it. Someone carved holds everywhere and I had a ton of fun climbing the rocks there.
The water cut out something like a basin in the rocks and I was using it as a bath.. I took disposable soap sheets and washed myself with them. Felt so good to bathe in a waterfall when birds sing and everything is so green. In the morning I went down to the beginning of the waterfall, sat down on a mossy log and brushed my teeth, it was awesome..
I took drip coffee bags to the trip and was treating everyone with tasty coffee that everyone loved. One day me and my friend didn't want to wait until the kettle boils and boiled the water for cofe in my steel mug on a tablet of dry alcohol.
Me sitting next to the fire, wearing my favorite jacket (thrifted!) and drinking cofe:
Sleeping in a tent kind of felt like being in limbo. You turn off the light and end up in complete darkness and silence. If you look outside, you see the tops of the trees, illuminated by moonlight, then you realize you are alone in the primeval forest at night, with nobody within kilometers in every direction. And a deep, animal fear sets in. The brain is just wired to feel that way in the night forest. The sleep was pretty comfy though.
Me and my friend took night walks every night of the trip. We armed ourselves with a knife, pepper spray and flashlights and went out exploring the night woods, when everyone else already fell asleep. Really tickles the nerves, but is super fun. We went down the waterfall, climbed the rocks in darkness, climbed into the cave and sat there for a while, listening to the sounds of night forest.
Dog companion
After we camped, we spent a couple more days just chilling in the town. Me and my fren saw some abandoned buildings during the day and we decided to explore them at night.
We went out after the midnight and while we were walking to our destination, we met a dog sitting near a shop called barboss. And barbos in russian means a dog without a breed.. He started following us, wagging his tail, and he spent more than an hour with us. He even followed us to the abandoned buildings themselves.
He responded to my voice and came closer if I called him, it was so great.. we literally met a dog and continued our way with it. How fucking cool is that? I couldn't stop smiling for the entire time barboss spent with us
The other night we managed to sneak into some random unfinished residential complex and go on the roof. The door to the roof had a set of 5 identical keys in it, we took one. Now I have a key from some roof in Goryachy Klyuch as a souvenir.
Urban exploration like this (climbing into the abandoned and into places where you aren't supposed to be) is actually one of my main hobbies at the moment, but I still haven't got to writing about it properly.. It's going to take some effort to structure my extensive urbex of the past two years into a blogpost. But I'll do it at some point.