Hiking From Rotondo Hütte Day Two

So on day two we all know that we're in for 6-8 hours of extremely challenging hiking. We start out from the hut and walk over a lot of rocks and around a big lake. First we come down some rocks:



Then we cross yet another stream (we must have crossed at least 30 of them), and then hike up some more snow and rocks. This area was different though because there was some mud in it! I'm the one in orange in these pictures:





This is Stefan. The guy with the map. He is standing next to a white-blue-white trail blaze (on one of the rocks, the blue color denoting that the hike is ranked in the most difficult category possible) and undoubtedly he has the next blaze in his sights. Behind him is the peak we're heading to. He led us and found our route for most of the hike, except when it got really difficult and then Mattias had to lead because he hangs out on cliffs and climbs rocks in his spare time.



This is Julian. He lent me the backpack that I used for this trip since Martin and I only had one hiking backpack here. We have a picture of him looking happier but I felt this one was more fitting to depict the hike:



This was the scariest part for me - walking across this snow field. You can't really see our foot tracks but we did not walk where the slope was gentle towards the bottom. We were sure somebody would fall but only one person slipped a good amount and he managed to get back up. Phew.



After that snow field we wandered over a lot of loose rocks on a really steep slope and we obviously did not take any pictures of that. But please refer to the picture of the Hut from Day One to see the ridge we were trying to climb up and you'll get the idea.

Here's Martin taking a little break:



I feel that this picture of Erick sums up the hike really well ... it shows somebody pushed to his limits and overcoming them to continue on and finish the hike:



Our snack spot when we were almost to the top. We are looking down the other side of the ridge now! The woman in this picture is Karin. She is French and is the only woman in Martin's group:



More of the view from our snack spot:



Then we did some more scary stuff along the ridge at the top. Some of it involved having to hold on to chains because the path was so narrow and falling off would lead to death. Then we got to start coming down! We came down 1200 meters straight. Here's some of what we walked down:



Here we are taking another break:



This is Nick. He's from Michigan and lives practically next door to us in Zürich. I told him he can watch our cat when we're out of town ... once we get a cat. Oh there were cats at the Rotondo Hütte! One old fat one who slept on all the seat cusions on the bench at the table where we ate dinner (so none of us could use the cushions because he was sleeping on the whole pile of them!), and a new little kitten who wandered around and meowed a lot and was really cute. But anyway here's Nick:



And here is Johannes. He had some bad sunburn on his hands that you can kind of see. Some of the guys had really great sunburns but we didn't get pictures of them. We all got great tan/burn lines from our T-shirts and hiking boots. Actually the guy standing right behind Johannes had the worst burn of everybody but his legs are hidden behind that backpack! Wish they weren't because they looked awesome.



And here I am:



After this point we started walking through nice green meadows with lots of pretty wildflowers. We ate lunch there and then we ended up on a dirt road that we had to walk 3.5 miles on in order to get to the bus stop. Right before the bus stop was a little pool of water (from one of the millions of streams up there) where we took off our boots and stuck our feet in. It was like heaven.

Here is the green slope we got to walk down, and the road is visible in the center right area of the picture:



We found a little tourist shop near the bus stop and loaded up on ice cream and sat and rehydrated and ate ice cream until the bus came. And then it started storming as soon as the bus came so we got back just in time!