This is another one of those must do’s. Everyday we go to school and we walk towards UCT with devil’s peak as its backdrop. I think there are something like 230 trails up and around the mountain so we were excited to see what we could do. We talked to our RD a couple of weeks ago and he told us that we could leave directly from UCT and there were some trails that went up. This sounded pretty straight forward so we waited for a nice day to climb.
Lane had a final last week Tuesday. It was supposed to be nice and sunny so we planned to go up after he finished with his final. It ended up being a really sunny day but a little hot. On the way up, we saw Rhode’s memorial. It was just something to do I guess and after all that stuff about UCT I had to at least take a look. There was a beautiful view. We took a mini break and then went up the mountain.
We were leaving the memorial to the trails but there were a lot of different trails to pick from. We had no idea what we were doing or where we were going. The parking lot attendant seemed to notice that we were lost and asked us where we wanted to go. We told him and he sounded skeptical and said that it would be a three hour trip there and back. We weren’t phased because we had plenty of water and food. Then he told us all the directions but there were a lot of turn heres and do this etc. I quickly forgot some of the details and so did Lane. But we went up anyways to at least see what we could do.
We got ¾ of the way of the mountain. It had been a pretty steep climb thus far. I was prepared for switchbacks and the like but they never came. We climbed stair after stair after stair and it was HOT! But we made it ¾ of the way up and then there was a trail divergence. Neither trail continued to go up so we had no idea which way to go. We deliberated for a while and chose to go left. It seemed the most like a trail rather than a road. Anyways, I still don’t know which way we should have gone but we never did make it up to the top of the mountain. I suspect that it was at this divergence we should have gone the other way. Regardless we hiked for a while and saw some great views. We hiked for about 4 hours in total and who knows how far we went …probably not that far but my legs did hurt in the end. We ended up just going down the trail and then turning back after we got a little tired. Ironically we found a trail that probably would have taken us to the top on the way back. Such is life I guess.
It was a fun experience. Later we were told how we should have done it but we will see if we actually get to do it again. At least we had a unique experience and saw part of the mountain that most people don’t get to see. We saw the attendant on our way down. He seemed surprised to see us and we told him that we took a wrong turn and so we decided to come back. He just smiled and we talked about how hard the climb is to get up as far as we did. We looked pretty gross I must admit. He was a really nice guy and I am glad that we got to meet him. He was funny.
After we got down, we ran into some RA's from the program and they looked at us like we were crazy for climbing up on that day. Chenai was like "I will never understand white people" She thinks that we are crazy for expending so much effort to climb the mountain. She didn't understand the appeal. It was funny.
In all, we didn’t necessarily accomplish what we had set out to do but had fun anyways. We sat and ate our lunch overlooking the city just 200 feet from the top of the mountain. It was really fun and it is one more item off the checklist!
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