Nothing quite like starring down at a snow-covered mountain side that drops suddenly and stretches straight down, farther than you can your eyes can possibly see, like waking you up after a long day of work. That was the scene I found myself in tonight, when I took a small crew up for night hiking but I was in such an awesome mood tonight so I felt invisible.
There's a group number of us workers here in the middle of No Man's Land but when 6pm rolls around and dinner is over, they all seem to scatter. Some of them head home while the vast majority of us stay here in the dorm. I take it they all go into hibernation mode after dinner because I don't hear a peep out of them until work starts the next day. They all know I go running and surely they must here my loud music blasting in my room when I return from my nightly runs and do a weight training circuit and a couple of them saw me playing soccer with some of random guys the other night, but they continue to just chat it up with me and not join me.
This past weekend I headed home to Cheonan briefly and I returned here with my headlamps. I was convinced I was going to stir up some physical activity among out crew.
Mission completed.
In the staff room I posted up a flyer I had made, it was for mountain hiking, and tonight two of my coworkers showed up for my event. I anticipated the mountain hike being somewhat dangerous closer to the top so I gave them a quick rundown on how to use their headlamps.
"If you have any trouble, just switch your hazards on -- press the button on your headlamp till is flashes", I told them.
Up the mountain we headed, only one of us wearing hiking boots and the other two wearing runners and regular winter boots. No worry, I thought, I didn't think it'd be too hard of a hike. The problem wasn't in hiking up but instead was in descending. I stuck to looking up when going up so it wasn't until we started heading back down that I saw first hand how dangerous it was. At one point I shined my light down the mountain side. The path was less than a foot in width at this point and the drop was definitely more than a few stories high. My heart skipped a couple of beats when the light of my headlamp bounced off the glistening, icy path in front of me. I was ok if I were to fall but I knew I'd feel terrible if either of the other two were to fall. They had agreed to come along with me -- this was my event, my idea, so it felt like my responsibility.
Safe and sound, we arrived back at the girls' dorm, our starting point. With giggles and our chatting still going strong, we stood there talking for a bit more and then parted our ways. My next night hike is planned for this Thursday. I'm going to bring hot chocolate for toasting our successful climb and goodies for us to share at the top.
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