Up and over another pass with incredible views of Mount Belukha ( the highest mountain in Siberia, at 14,800′). The massif had four peaks with snow glistening, and over 700 square miles of glaciers. Mount Belukha is a favorite for serious climbers and a Korean mountaineering group was there at the same time. (Most ascents are of the eastern peak.) There was also a mountaineering base and Rescue Service station on the shore of Akkem Lake along with a meteo station.
Hiking alongside and through a boulder-filled river to another permanent tented camp. By now, everyone was keeping detailed notes about this exploratory trek. Mountain Travel Sobek was going to hear from us if we survived what was beginning to resemble a Green Beret exercise.
Would you now like to hear about the food…or lack of food? No one expected super-duper or even adquate food in Siberia, but…
Breakfast was a thin gruel (shades of Oliver Twist), stale bread, tea and coffee (until they ran out of instant coffee). Lunch – more stale bread, cans of tuna and sardines, sometimes a few slices of cheese and the last four days, raisins, cookies and dried apricots. Lunch was definitely the highlight of the day. Dinner – dehydrated soup, kasha, macaroni and twice, meat in a stew-type thing. Snack? The meager stores of chocolate were life-savers amd we savored every morsel. Our pre-trip information: “we’ll have plenty of excellent foood on trek, but you might want to bring along your favorite snack food (etc.). Although we’ll be served plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables on trek…” ex-Marine and I were rationing what few snacks I packed, along with the one roll of toilet paper since toilet paper was never supplied. This was becoming a crisis! Returning to the U.S., Steve lost 12 pounds and I lost 7 – a true indication of how terrible and monotonous the food was. Don’t forget, we were hiking hours and miles every day. All that being said, Mount Belukha was awe-inspiring and gorgeous. It was impossible to take too many photographs in the constantly changing light.
To compound the multitude of problems, no one ever had boiled water for drinking and had to use iodine tablets for purification the entire trip. There was no washing water. The staff was unsanitary – Senaru (little cook) dropped bowls in the mud and then served from them, etc. BUT, somehow, everyone stayed healthy! Go figure…
