Poon Hill

It's official - we made it

4:15 am?! Wait a minute – we’re on vacation – I thought. This day, however, we were getting up early to trek up the steep hill to the top of Poon Hill, for a sunrise view of two of the largest mountains in the world – Annapurna (8,091m) and Dhaulagiri (8167m). We start out around 4:45 to hike through the pitch black village (no street lights here) and up into the rhododendron forest (yes, forest, you read correctly. Rhododendrons here are not bushes here, they are huge trees).

Sun across the mountains

For this trip, we decided to rent sleeping bags and jackets from Bill since what we have here is for desert camping rather than cold weather camping. When we got the jackets, I was appalled to discover that one of the jackets was pink – bright pink. I had resigned myself to being the one stuck with it…until I happily discovered that it was reversible, with only two small pink stripes on the reverse side. I also have to admit, as we started the climb, wearing those huge down jackets, I thought it was totally overkill. I ended up shedding just about all of my layers on the way up – and poor Pfuri and Tserig ended up carrying the jackets for both of us.

Sun peaking through the clouds

It was really difficult to climb – the steepness of the stairway (hmmm...steep stairs…nah…very unusual here) and the dark. For some reason the dark really seemed to make it more difficult. Although I was convinced it took us close to 2 hours to toil up the mountain, Tserig (and the ipod) assured me that it really was closer to 50 minutes. Along the way, I had the chance for many stray thoughts to enter my head…things like this was a case of mass insanity – climbing a hill in the dark? There were many of us, climbing that hill in the pitch black morning. I was also impressed with the entrepreneurship of the Nepalese people – a small group of men had a coffee/tea stand up on top of Poon Hill where they sold these wonderful hot drinks and snacks to all of us crazy people who hiked to the top to endure the bitter cold to view the sunrise.

Remember those jackets I thought were totally overkill…they weren’t. When we hit the top of the hill we discovered it was cold, bitterly cold, the wind was biting and the jackets were wonderful. I actually wished that they were knee length! Fortunately we were up there on a morning that was relatively clear – we had some clouds shrouding the mountains but to be fair, the clouds also gave us a little bit of color to the sunrise. It was really something to stand on the mountain and watch the sun come up, shedding light across the giants, sitting so close to the top of the world.