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Roopkund Trek - Day 6: Reaching the highest campsite - Bhagwabhasa (altitude: 14100 ft)

This post is part of Roopkund Trek - An unforgettable adventure!. The previous article in the series is Day 5: Heading for the next higher campsite - Patar Nachauni (altitude: 12700 ft).

This was the day where we would experience first-hand the harshness of the mountains! The rains that started the previous night showed no signs of stopping and while the rains were only sort of an inconvenience the previous night, today, they turned out to be really painful as we had to trek in the rain to our highest campsite. My water-proof gloves proved useless against the rain and I began to experience some sort of numbness in my fingers. I was extremely concerned by the numbness as I was feeling that prolonged numbness could lead to dead fingers (However, I later learnt that the temperatures have to be much lower and exposure much longer for something like this to happen). Unsurprisingly, there wasn't much goofing around today and everybody just kept walking until they reached the campsite.

The incessant rains had by now began to take a toll on us. Our shoes, clothes, gloves, everything was drenched. The terrain was extremely rocky, which meant that if we were less likely to skid, but if we did, we'd hurt ourselves pretty bad. The toilets here also were dry compared to those at the other campsites, which was sort of an inconvenience. Almost all of us started to miss home at this point in time!

For the most of the day, we stayed in our tents and towards evening, gathered in the dinner tent. Here we started conversing with the Indiahikes staff. Of particular interest was a trek lead, who was stationed at this campsite for few weeks to take care of it. He had a lot of interesting stories to share, especially related to paranormal activities experienced by other trek leads. He also told us that he considered the facilities provided by IndiaHikes to be luxurious and to actually experience difficulties of trekking first-hand, one should attempt a solo trek. Among everything we discussed, the most interesting was the story of an endurance runner, Kilian Jornet. Climbing without fixed ropes or oxygen, he reached the Mount Everest summit via a new route in 26 hours. Now that's quite a feat!

The next day, was the day when we would actually be trekking to Roopkund. However, the rains at our campsite indicated that there would be snow falling at Roopkund and hence the decision to actually trek to Roopkund would only be taken the next day.

Go on to the next article in the series: Day 7: An attempt to reach Roopkund and down to Bedni Bugyal.

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