Conquering Gharib Ghar

Today we woke up really early, so we could scratch off one of the aforementioned list items. There are mountains all around us, some of them are more accessible than others. A few neighboring camps have setup trips to go out to a range and climb a mountain and today, with the assistance of one of the Air Force officers, we setup our own trip. We arrived at about 6, and we were told that it looks much easier than it truly is. Honestly, it DIDN'T look easy, but it did look fairly short, so I was happy about that.

We started up the trail and it's a good 1/2 mile up a moderate hill, to get to the point where it started getting steep. We quickly learned that none of us are in the shape we thought we were in. We hit the rocky part of the climb and trudged up best we could, stopping occasionally to let the group recover, and for me (and others I'm sure) let our hearts stop pounding. About 1/2 hour into our initial ascent, we hit a peak, and I thought it was done....I was wrong, oh so wrong. The nice thing was it was a grassy peak, so we stopped, rested, took some pictures and then pressed on.

This is where the climb went more vertical, and less side to side. I actually preferred this part as it was a little better being able to use my arms as well as legs. There weren't any parts that were considered "dangerous", but there were some times that if you were afraid of heights, and looked off to the left or right, you wouldn't have been happy. Near the top it went to more of a knife edge than a trail and got a little more complicated, but as long as you went slow it was no big deal. The entire climb is like 1400 ft up total....I think the peak is somewhere near 7400 ft. For those interested, here is a link to the range in Google Maps.

We had a good time, and it's one of the items on the list crossed off! My pictures are here.

Gary