Day 2- Shira 1 to Shira 2

Mr. Coffee woke us up at 6 AM. Neither one of us had slept well. Everyone is taking a medication called Diamox which is supposed to help with altitude sickness, but one of the major side effects is that it makes you have to pee ALL THE TIME! Add to that the 3-4 liters of water we are drinking per day and it doesn’t make for a long peaceful snooze. Plus- to get out of a relatively warm sleeping bag, slip into shoes, and head out to try to find the toilet tent in the freezing cold involved a great deal of self persuasion.
Got our big duffels packed up and entered the dining tent for breakfast and got our first introduction to the “all white diet”.
Watery porridge (white)
Lightly toasted Pullman bread (white)
African crepe (white)
Lightly colored scrambled eggs (slightly less white)
Banana slices (white)
And mango (not white!)
Clearly we would not be eating the rainbow on this trip!
After breakfast we got our day packs ready, including filling our hydration packs and hit the trail.
From Shira 1 to Shira 2 is about 7 kms and a 400 meter elevation gain. It is rated as low difficulty by Altezza, but Cynthia and I both thought it was kind of challenging. The main hike took about 4 hours. I chose a couple of mantras for when things got tough: “Courage over comfort”, and “Embrace the suck”. These both worked pretty well today!
We had “white lunch” at camp:
(Watery soup, huge mound of white rice, white pasta, or white potatoes with a scant amount of some sort of sauce. Oh- also usually some sort of a salad involving cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions. Cynthia had indicated an intolerance to onions on her reservation form, but someone had dropped the ball on this as almost every dish served contained onions.)
Following lunch we did an acclimatization hike toward Lava Tower, which we would be climbing the following day.
The remainder of the day followed the usual schedule. At this point, it’s fair to say that everyone was exhausted by the time we climbed into our tents. And looking forward to the warmth of our little bunnies!Read more