Trekking - Day 5 continued

Now that I have time for a proper post, I'll start over for what was the highlight of the trek.

I woke up at 6:15 to see the sun rise over the looming mountains. After an extremely cloudy night I was worried we wouldn't be able to see anything. We got lucky instead. It was gorgeous, blue skies and just a few clouds. We climbed to a little weather station to see views of the Fish Tail and the valley we walked through, which was beautiful. Then we had breakfast and set off on a two hour hike to the final destination.

At first it was very cold but once I got into the sun I was pretty warm. At altitude the sun is so strong that you can't look at some of the mountains without sunglasses because it's so bright reflecting off the snow. Also even though it was near freezing I was down to just a shirt and light pants with no problem.

It was slow going, but I enjoyed every second of it. There are mountains all around, just towering over the valley, despite the fact that the base camp is at 4130 meters (about 13,500 feet). I took a short video to give everyone a little better idea. Once we made it to the base camp we had tea then I went a little higher, to about 4200 meters (14,000 feet) to see the view over a ridge to the Annapurna range. The mountains were covered by clouds at this point, but there was unexpectedly spectacular valley of rocks from avalanches below the ridge. I sat up there for about a half hour and heard about 5 or 10 small avalanches in the distance (I couldn't see any of them).

I came down from there and spent the afternoon and night talking to a couple groups of Aussies and a Tibetan guide. It was fun despite the cold. At night I was able to get some decent pictures of the mountains due to a nearly full moon, as well as maybe my favorite picture that I've ever taken.