Picking wild blueberries at Buta!
Teambuilding games...
Stories about Retezat from Pex, our trail guide.
Sheep and donkeys and shepherds... a common sight.
The first few days of the trip were lovely, though it took a bit of time for our group to settle in to life together. But eventually, with lots of intentional conversations and fun games and time together, the two "cliques" which had developed among the kids seemed to settle down and the group united. When we weren't hiking we played a lot of teambuilding games, listened to stories about the national park from our trail guide Pex, discussed Leave No Trace principles and learned orienteering with a compass and map, and had a lot of fun with charades, story-telling, and a squeaky plastic pig toy named Porky. One day we spent the morning picking up trash from the camping area where we were staying. Because the outhouses have been so poorly maintained, visitors generally go to the bathroom in the woods, behind every tree and rock they can find. Almost all of them leave their toilet paper behind, as well as various other nasty things: sanitary wipes, tampons, kleenex, plastic bags, candy wrappers. The kids were appalled, and spent a few hours picking up these unfortunate reminders of humans' impact on the natural world. Some of them were angry and pessimistic that the situation will look just as bad in a few weeks, but others thought maybe their efforts to clean the area would discourage others from dirtying it. Either way, I was so proud of them and the selfless, dirty work they did that day. And that night, as I sat amongst some of the girls in their tent before bedtime, they were talking and dreaming of ways they could help educate people so that this won't keep happening. And that made me smile.
The whole woods was like this...
After the cleanup: so proud of these kids!
On Wednesday we did the long summit hike from Poiana Pelegii to Lake Bucura to Peleaga Peak, the highest point in Retezat National Park (2509 meters, or 8232 feet). The summit hike is fascinating. From Lake Bucura to the top of Peleaga, the landscape is what I've always imagined the moon to be like. There is little vegetation, and most of the time you're picking your way gradually through fields of large granite rocks. It's steep and dangerous, and unlike parks I'm used to in the States, there are no guardrails or warning signs to dissuade unprepared hikers. I guess the landscape is imposing enough to do that itself. But we made it safe and sound, victorious and happy at the top, and slowly headed down the other side to settle down for some well-deserved lunch before heading back to camp.
the beautiful Lake Bucura
We made it to the top!
And then it started to rain.
We had planned to spend Thursday at camp, learning about first aid and playing various games, having a talent show that night, and then hiking all the way out of the park on Friday. But Wednesday, as it poured and poured and poured, we started to re-think our plans. By the time we got back to camp from the summit, everyone was soaked, even though we'd brought rain jackets with us. At camp we made the unfortunate realization that about half of our kids' sleeping bags had gotten wet in the rain, and that some of them didn't have warm, dry clothes left either. Thankfully there was a mountain rescue lodge at the camping area, and they offered to let ten of our shivering kids spend the night inside. The rest of us changed our socks, wrung out our clothes as best we could, and settled down for another night in the tents. Wednesday night there was a huge storm, with thunder and lightning roaring and rattling through the mountains right above us, trees swaying ominously in the illumination of the lightning flashes. By Thursday morning the rain had slowed to a drizzle, but it was still falling, and by now even the kids whose tents had stayed dry were feeling cold and damp. We decided to hike out a day early, rather than try to endure another day with so many of our participants being inadequately prepared -- and so Thursday morning we packed up our still-wet tents, shaking the raindrops off as best we could, and put our packs back on. We made the hike out in about 7 hours, with rain following us for about half the time. Thankfully, the kids were troopers, and most of them didn't complain at all.
In fact, my favorite moment of the whole trip happened as we were approaching the end of that long hike out. One of the girls, Carina, had been really struggling under the weight of her backpack. She was tiny, short and petite, and for most of the hike our guide Pex had actually been carrying her pack as well as his own. But in the last hour, Pex had to turn around to head back up to the mountain rescue station, leaving Carina with her own pack. Various kids from the group had taken turns carrying it in addition to their own, passing luggage around every fifteen minutes as they got tired -- but in the very last thirty minutes, the path becomes narrow and steep, and Carina was stuck carrying her own pack. And she was exhausted. So then, as I'm watching, the other smallest kid on the trip, 13-year-old Cosmin, who's also skinny as a stick and whose voice has yet to deepen, reaches out and takes her hand. "Come on," he tells her. "You can do it." And so the two of them labor together down the steep, muddy hill, while rain pummels them and their backpacks practically push them over with the weight. At one point, Cosmin slips and falls, cartoon-style, flat on his back in the mud, but gets right back up again with help from Carina. And then -- miracle of miracles! -- another girl, who had been whiney and complaining the whole trip, whose own pack was light and yet still kept stopping and begging for a break -- she saw Cosmin fall, and she decided to help too. And for the last fifteen minutes, the three of them worked together, hand in hand, slowly making their way down the last hill, out of the mountains, in the rain.
It was beautiful. So, so beautiful.
We got home Thursday night around dinner time. Everything was wet and needed to be aired out, and after setting up ten tents to dry and sending off twenty jubilant, exhausted, soggy teenagers, I was glad to be home and take a warm shower. But it was all worth it, and lovely. We're having a reunion and thank-you party for Pex tomorrow afternoon, and I'm excited to see the kids again, this time in cute jeans and flip-flops, cell phones in hand. It will be different, and I'll probably lament some of the distractions. But after taking them into the wilderness, I think something did change. I guess tomorrow we'll see.
At Lake Bucura
At the summit of Peleaga
Sounds like an amazing experience. And thank you for the pictures :-)
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