Mount K
We spent two days at Mount K, so this entry might not be as long as others; it definitely doesn't have as many pics. A good number of them weren't taken by me but by Caroline, the Raleigh photographer lady. She's awesome. <3 (Rule of the thumb - if it's a good pic, it's by Caroline, if it's not, it's by me.)
At the end of the first phase, Alpha Six and Alpha Five - plus some of the Raleigh staff from fieldbase - combined forces to climb Mount K. The highest peak on Mount Kinabalu is Low's Peak, 13,435 feet (4095 meters) above sea level, and that's where we were headed. Whoo!
(Guess who took that photo.)
At first, it's a lot like walking through Calderglen or something: nice wide paths, more like a park than a mountain. I ended up walking with some of the girls in Alpha Five: Jo, Katie and Jun.
We were all terribly excited to get above the clouds. Or, at least, I was.
Climbing Mount K is pretty much the Thing To Do if you're in Sabah - it's like, the tallest user-friendly mountain in the world. If you can walk then you can climb it (it might take you a while, but it's doable). The classic way is to climb all day to Laban Rata (3300m up), sleep for a few hours then get up at two am, aiming to reach Low's Peak for sunrise. This is what we did.
It was amazing, watching the rocks and plants change around us. The higher we got, the smaller and more stunted the trees became, the trail we were following went from dirt to red stone to hard gret stone, the animals quietened. I was obviously imagining that I was climbing to the top of Amon Din - my personal pseudo-canon about the beacons of Gondor is that they're maintained by a combination of criminals and young Gondorians on a sort of National Service style period, depending on how inhospitable the mountain is. I explained all this to my companions, who looked at me funny.
That's Laban Rata, where we stayed for the night.
At about quarter to two we got up, put on our warmest clothes and our headtorches, and gulped down some overpriced breakfast. Most people brought their sleeping bags. I'm a twat so I only brought my sleeping liner. WORLD OF DIFFERENCE. It wasn't just the Raleigh lot doing this, of course, so when we went outside the atmosphere was pretty charged: tourists and participants and guides in too-warm clothes excitedly heading off or waiting to start. It was mostly stairs at first - more ladders, really, thin and steep and made for much longer legs. Then it was like... the mountain wall was beside us, at a, I dunno, more-than-45-degree angle, and we were walking up a seam in it, diagonally along the face of the mountain. A scar. There was a rope beside it but that was more to guide your way than to hold onto.
The darkest parts of Mount K are the steepest. All you know is that it's going up and that your legs are burning and the tiny dotted trail of people's headtorches goes on forever, on and on until they vanish over the horizon. If you looked to your left there was the drop - you could see towns and villages hundreds of miles away. By this point everyone's going at different paces. I can't really remember how the route transitions, but at some point you stop walking across the face of the mountain and start walking up - it feels like climbing the inside of a bowl, half a bowl, like you're a spider trying to trek up the curve of the sink except if you slip and fall you'd tumble and fall right down off the edge of the world.
It felt like forever, seriously. The horizon kept shifting back and back, like it was teasing you. I was walking with Carly, and we would stop and rest quite a bit on fissures in the mountain. When we got to Low's Peak it was more like a big pile of rocks you had to clamber up on top of. By the time we got there the place was already getting sort of crowded. We crammed ourselves into a comfortable-ish crevice and shared the warmth of Carly's sleeping bag (yay!) and my sleeping liner (completely worthless), and didn't realise until it was too busy to move that we would have no view of the sunrise whatsoever.
What everyone else saw:
Incredible awe-inspiring view.
What we saw:
Josh looking like a Naruto character.
Ah well. XD
There is something that you discover, though, when you climb to the top of a mountain. An important truth.
That important truth is that climbing mountains is completely and utterly pointless.
If you've spent the better half of two days climbing to the top of a summit, you now need to climb all the way back down. Except this time people expect you to do it quicker, it hurts your knees and you can see -exactly- how high you are. It's terrifying. It's pointless terror. You can't even get a coffee before you leave. You can't even go to the toilet before you leave!
This is why people don't live at the tops of mountains.
Apart from the slight case of mind-numbing terror, I actually quite enjoyed climbing down from the summit. (This doesn't make it less pointless.) I set off before Carly and all that because I knew it was going to take me a while to get over the OHMYGODI'LLFALLFOREVER thing, so I got to enjoy the utterly unique landscape up there. It was like... a silent, still desert of rock. Nothing grows or lives up there, except the occasional spot off moss in the tiny pools of rainwater that collect in rock fissures. Miniture peaks flare up like horns. Calm and still.
Ah, Mount K. You may have been pointless but I'm glad I climbed you. Even if I couldn't walk properly for four days afterwards. <3
At the end of the first phase, Alpha Six and Alpha Five - plus some of the Raleigh staff from fieldbase - combined forces to climb Mount K. The highest peak on Mount Kinabalu is Low's Peak, 13,435 feet (4095 meters) above sea level, and that's where we were headed. Whoo!
(Guess who took that photo.)
At first, it's a lot like walking through Calderglen or something: nice wide paths, more like a park than a mountain. I ended up walking with some of the girls in Alpha Five: Jo, Katie and Jun.
We were all terribly excited to get above the clouds. Or, at least, I was.
Climbing Mount K is pretty much the Thing To Do if you're in Sabah - it's like, the tallest user-friendly mountain in the world. If you can walk then you can climb it (it might take you a while, but it's doable). The classic way is to climb all day to Laban Rata (3300m up), sleep for a few hours then get up at two am, aiming to reach Low's Peak for sunrise. This is what we did.
It was amazing, watching the rocks and plants change around us. The higher we got, the smaller and more stunted the trees became, the trail we were following went from dirt to red stone to hard gret stone, the animals quietened. I was obviously imagining that I was climbing to the top of Amon Din - my personal pseudo-canon about the beacons of Gondor is that they're maintained by a combination of criminals and young Gondorians on a sort of National Service style period, depending on how inhospitable the mountain is. I explained all this to my companions, who looked at me funny.
That's Laban Rata, where we stayed for the night.
At about quarter to two we got up, put on our warmest clothes and our headtorches, and gulped down some overpriced breakfast. Most people brought their sleeping bags. I'm a twat so I only brought my sleeping liner. WORLD OF DIFFERENCE. It wasn't just the Raleigh lot doing this, of course, so when we went outside the atmosphere was pretty charged: tourists and participants and guides in too-warm clothes excitedly heading off or waiting to start. It was mostly stairs at first - more ladders, really, thin and steep and made for much longer legs. Then it was like... the mountain wall was beside us, at a, I dunno, more-than-45-degree angle, and we were walking up a seam in it, diagonally along the face of the mountain. A scar. There was a rope beside it but that was more to guide your way than to hold onto.
The darkest parts of Mount K are the steepest. All you know is that it's going up and that your legs are burning and the tiny dotted trail of people's headtorches goes on forever, on and on until they vanish over the horizon. If you looked to your left there was the drop - you could see towns and villages hundreds of miles away. By this point everyone's going at different paces. I can't really remember how the route transitions, but at some point you stop walking across the face of the mountain and start walking up - it feels like climbing the inside of a bowl, half a bowl, like you're a spider trying to trek up the curve of the sink except if you slip and fall you'd tumble and fall right down off the edge of the world.
It felt like forever, seriously. The horizon kept shifting back and back, like it was teasing you. I was walking with Carly, and we would stop and rest quite a bit on fissures in the mountain. When we got to Low's Peak it was more like a big pile of rocks you had to clamber up on top of. By the time we got there the place was already getting sort of crowded. We crammed ourselves into a comfortable-ish crevice and shared the warmth of Carly's sleeping bag (yay!) and my sleeping liner (completely worthless), and didn't realise until it was too busy to move that we would have no view of the sunrise whatsoever.
What everyone else saw:
Incredible awe-inspiring view.
What we saw:
Josh looking like a Naruto character.
Ah well. XD
There is something that you discover, though, when you climb to the top of a mountain. An important truth.
That important truth is that climbing mountains is completely and utterly pointless.
If you've spent the better half of two days climbing to the top of a summit, you now need to climb all the way back down. Except this time people expect you to do it quicker, it hurts your knees and you can see -exactly- how high you are. It's terrifying. It's pointless terror. You can't even get a coffee before you leave. You can't even go to the toilet before you leave!
This is why people don't live at the tops of mountains.
Apart from the slight case of mind-numbing terror, I actually quite enjoyed climbing down from the summit. (This doesn't make it less pointless.) I set off before Carly and all that because I knew it was going to take me a while to get over the OHMYGODI'LLFALLFOREVER thing, so I got to enjoy the utterly unique landscape up there. It was like... a silent, still desert of rock. Nothing grows or lives up there, except the occasional spot off moss in the tiny pools of rainwater that collect in rock fissures. Miniture peaks flare up like horns. Calm and still.
Ah, Mount K. You may have been pointless but I'm glad I climbed you. Even if I couldn't walk properly for four days afterwards. <3