Mogote

Last story from the summer program—though there’s not a whole lot to tell. Ari and I had talked about climbing Mogote when

he came to visit me in the clinic, and we finally put it together our last weekend. We went really early. We were supposed to meet up in the park at 7 a.m., but I turned off my alarm in my sleep—this was the morning after we went to la confluencia and Maggie called me at 7:15 wondering where I was. I hurried to get up and get up and get dressed, called Ari, and headed up to the park. Ari and Juan Carlos were being slow too—they didn’t get there till after the guagua arrived. We finally headed out at something like 8:30 and stopped at a colmado to grab some food—and I bought a ‘Che’ hat because I didn’t have sunglasses at the time.

Mogote, let me tell you, starts out steep and just gets steeper. It may have been the most intense hiking I’d done. But it was a gorgeous day and that mountain is so beautiful. We’d been told the hike was going to take 4 hours, and when we were all dying after just 15 minutes we got a little scared! The water went fast

too—I’d drunk mine well before we reached the top.

I’m a go hard-and-fast with short rests type hiker, and luckily so was everyone I was with! Except Ari. I think he was a little out of shape then, and he was wearing a whole track suit because he was afraid of sunburn! I’d told him I would bring him sunblock, but for some reason he wore that track suit anyway. Every so often we’d stop together and yell “Ari!” down the trail, and wait till he made his way up.

Juan Carlos was pretty fast, and as we got tired near the top he went on ahead. He is really a good hiker! He took an interest in Maggie, trying to talk to her a

lot, but we told him she had a novio in the states. As we got very near the top, we passed a dead dog on the side of the trail. It was pretty sad; someone had brought it there, tied it to a tree and left it to die—presumably of thirst. Some of the girls were pretty upset.

It was a such a relief to get to the top! We made it up in 2 hours and 15

minutes, and let me tell you we were pretty damn impressed with ourselves. There’s a little wood house and outdoor kitchen thing with a fogón there—I think a family lives there and takes care of the site. There were some people packing up their tents from the night before too.

The view is amazing! You can see forever—mountains, trees, not to mention all of Jarabacoa. We tood a bunch of pictures, ate some snacks. Ari and Juan Carlos had brought us bread and hot chocolate—they made hot chocolate on the fogón and then we had another snack. Hot as it was there, the hot chocolate still tasted good.

It was starting to get late then, and a couple people really wanted to get going. Going down was tougher than you’d think—especially at the part of the path that’s too steep to walk down! The mountain slopes away quickly on either side of the path, and it’s so sleep you have to slide down it. I sort of crouched with one foot in front of the other and slid down that way.

As I got to the bottom of the slope I stood up like I was on a snowboard, and then ran down until I lost momentum. There were wild raspberries beside the trail too—which really delighted me—and we ate raspberries and watched all the different methods people used to slide down. Then we sort of ran down the mountain—this went fairly quickly.

We tried to stop at a house that the boys knew for water, but the family wasn’t home. Finally we stopped at a colmado. When I first drank some water, I could actually feel a sort of tingling sensation throughout my body as all my tissues rehydrated! Then we walked for a while and hitched a ride back to Jarabacoa. You can see Mogote from my neighborhood—we looked back at how high it was and felt prett special! And when I got home, the cold bucket bath felt absolutely amazing.