“Very few care for this laborious kind of pursuit, which is in no means lucrative. It is not everyone who can take pleasure in climbing hills which reach the clouds.”

Starting out from what is considered the last settlement, the last town in which people live besides the sporadic tea houses set up for climbers, Kevin and I felt great. Though our muscles were a bit sore, Kevin had fixed his back problem by creating a bamboo frame for his backpack, while the fuzzy slippers I had been hiking in had given my painful blisters time to harden into calluses. We steadily gained over a thousand meters of elevation without hardly realizing it, that is, before we came to the snow. Though we only had five hundred or so meters left to gain for the day, we were slowed down immensely by the fact that we were walking up an extremely steep hillside completely covered in snow. I found myself more often than not using my hands and knees to push myself up through the most difficult sections, and joked that for every two steps up, I was sliding at least one down. Eventually though we spotted a decently sized cabin type structure through the clouds and snow and knew we had arrives.

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