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22/08/06 to 29/08/06 |
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Day 4 - The Boys - by Mark The boys awoke at 6am and to their surprise it was clear outside! So they jumped out of bed, dragged on clothes, ate a slice of bread for breakfast and were off…..but by that time it was 7am - far too much faffing for 3 blokes!! The first 20 minutes was spent trudging uphill just like the day before, but that was where the walking ended and the climbing started!! We reached the first of many wire ropes and iron pegs to help us on our ascent. After another 30 minutes of climbing we reached a ridge which we would follow all the way to the top. This was quite exposed but more wire rope helped us on our way. By now there was a covering of snow on the ground from the overnight weather. A final steep section saw us summit Triglav - at 2858m the highest mountain in Slovenia - at 8:40am. The views were magnificent - we could see to Croatia, Italy and Austria. We were the first ones to the top that day but were soon joined by 3 other couples - 7 out of the 9 of us were from England!! Thankfully there were no Slovenians with strips of beechwood to perform the customary whipping on your first ascent of Triglav!! After the usual photos we began the long descent - all 2200 metres of it. We decided to go down via the Triglav Lakes valley which would take us to the other end of Lake Bohinj. The going was fairly easy to begin with but then there was yet more ironwork to help us traverse across a rock face - the most exposed section we encountered. It was all straightforward, if not long, from this point onwards. We reached Dolic hut, restocked on water and climbed a further 200m. It was now all downhill! It would still take us 5 hours to get down though. The last section descended 600m in no distance at all - not what was needed at the end of a long day. All that was needed now was to get back to Tolmin, but that proved to be a lot harder than climbing the mountain! We missed the last bus by 10 minutes so phoned a taxi. As this got into the station we saw the train pulling away so had an hour and a half wait for the next one and eventually made it home at 10:30pm. Luckily we had spag bol waiting for us, so it was shower, food and then to the pub next door for a celebratory drink. |
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Northants20s30sRA |
