Fall Fix

How many blog posts about hiking are too many?  In all fairness, this may be the very last of such posts while we're in Mongolia.  So I'm going with it. We actually inaugurated this blog last year when Andy wrote our first post about this hike:  Andy's tale of last year's hike.  We've been wanting to do the hike again ever since last July.  But it takes the right set of factors - organization to arrange a driver and transport to the start, a good crew of people up for a challenging hike, and good weather.  We had all of that in spades yesterday. 

 As for me, a 16k hike on a cracked leg is certainly not the brightest idea, but I figured it couldn't get more broken, and I was not going to miss my last chance to do this hike before leaving Mongolia.   Our crew of 10 got to the destroyed monastery of Mandshir Khiid around 9:30 and headed into the Bogd Khan protected area.  From that point, we just had to keep moving forward until we reached home.  Gotta love point-to-point hikes.  We had absolutely perfect weather, and the fall color was amazing - like nothing I saw here last year. 

I spent the whole hike just trying to soak in the colors and the scent of dried pine and store it away carefully in my memory for winter.  The hike felt easier than last year, though it's due mainly to two things.  One, we knew the route better and thus avoided getting mired in the bog, and two, I knew about the monster hill 2/3 of the way into the hike.  I was mentally prepared for it, and just kept grinding uphill, knowing that it was all flat and downhill to the finish from there!

Monster Hill

It doesn't get much better than this.