Scaling Skandagiri-II

...Continued from part-I

We started our climb at 2 in the morning and soon lost our way:). As with any group, this led to lot of accusations from most of us on everyone but themselves. But the view from the 'dead end' itself made the unintended detour worthwhile.

While we turned back and were searching for the correct path, Sandy fell and injured his leg badly in the process. That he didn't give up and finished the whole climb speaks a lot about his mental and physical fitness.
The above accident split our group into 2.People who were ahead had no idea about the severity of the fall and merrily reached the top of the mountain by4 A.M.As we had to support Sandy in his climb and also get Kamte to do the same( quite a task..), we got left behind. The view at the night itself was quite deceptive, it made us believe that the top was within reach, only to show us that it was still a long way ahead. This made our group irritable and people who were ahead got a lot of stick.
After all the above, we reached the top by 4:45A.M, and the view was breathtaking. It made our tiredness vanish in no time. There are a couple of buildings in ruins along with a Shiva temple, which is where we had a campfire going on. It was cold, windy and blustery which made us to fall on top of one another to get some sleep.
We saw the setting of the moon(first for me) while the sunrise was blocked by clouds.While it was a bit of dampener for us, the view of surroundings in daylight made up for it easily. We stayed at the top till 7:30A.M, took photos, and started to come down.
As with the climb, some among us got down quickly, while we took our sweet time to get down and did so by 11A.M. By that time, most of us were sleeping inside couple of empty water pipes. As some of us were still coming down, this led me to sleep on top of them(pipes).
We came back to the city centre by 2, and reached Banglore by 4 in the afternoon. We slept like hibernating bears till the next morning ( Suzie was an exception).
It was a pleasant experience and I look forward to many such.

P.P.S: I wish to thank everyone who came that night. In no particular order, we were me;), Maava, Boggi, Suzie, Kavi, Vaibhav, Gubaal, Kamte, Pramod, Pradeep, Sudi, cc, Wodeyar, Raviraj, Shastri, Vinay, Shivprasad and Sandy