Our first full day of hiking in Slovenia. Today we climbed Viševnik, a 2000-metre peak. Which sounds like a lot, but you don’t start at sea level, of course.
The actual ascent was just over 700 metres. Which is still a lot, especially on a hot, sunny day! And the route up this mountain was steep and unrelenting. Up, up, up, constantly, with barely any breaks in the ascent, or even a zig-zag. The first half of the ascent was also quite boring – for a big chunk of the lower parts, we followed a dusty trail through through a monotonous spruce forest. I don’t even have any photos from that part.
Halfway up we were feeling quite knackered and demoralized, and not enjoying ourselves much at all. But then we came to a small plateau with actual views, and enough room to sit down and take a proper break, and got some calories into us, and found the energy to keep going. After that the actual ascent didn’t get any easier, but the landscape opened up and got more varied, so the effort felt less.
And occasionally we even got views of the peak we were heading for!
Adrian really struggled with the heat and was seriously thinking of turning back even when we had no more than 15 minutes left to the peak. But with plenty of encouragement, and relieved of his rucksack, he managed to keep going.
The higher we climbed, the more fabulous the views were.
And we made it! When we got to the top, all we wanted to do was sit down and drink lots of water and scarf down dried fruit for some fast calories.
Once we had revived ourselves, we took photos.
The way down required less huffing and puffing, but more attention and concentration to not lose our footing.
By the time we were done with the descent and just walking back to the car, even Adrian was full of cheer, almost skipping along, and talking about how the whole thing wasn’t so bad after all, and how cool it is to climb a peak, and how he could totally do this again.
How selective our memories can be! The best parts we’ll remember for a long time, and the worst parts melt into a vague sense of “it was a bit of an adventure”. The same happened with our last day in Mercantour, when we got caught in hail and thunder. When we were living through it, the last half-hour of it felt pretty horrible, with me carrying Adrian in my arms, curling up around him to protect him from the hail. But six years later it feels like it wasn’t so bad at all.