I was still climbing into my bunk when Ronna, a social worker in her early 60s, raced into the room, wide-eyed. “There’s a nude-fest going on in the women’s shower room!” she gasped. “I never looked like that when I was twenty!” The men were still wondering how they could sneak a peek when I set off to see for myself. I found the fleshpot Ronna had described: Several naked German girls were standing around talking and laughing as nonchalantly as if they had been posing for Rembrandt.
Back in my bunker, more trouble was brewing. Steve the investment banker had sacked out in a first-floor bunk and was already snoring—loudly. Ronna tried to wake him up, but no luck. The other guys, after trying to fit into sleeping sacks that were much too small for them, were resigned to sleeping inside the sleeping bags without the protection of the liner bags.
The refugio’s sleeping bags looked and smelled like they hadn’t been washed since the last Ice Age. We had just realized that the mattresses were even dirtier than the bags when Jackie waltzed in and warned us not to touch anything. “My daughter got fleas from sleeping at a refugio,” she said. Note to self: If I do this again, I’ll bring my own set of portable sheets! After several agonizing hours of fidgeting, squirming and scratching, I checked my watch. It was three am and I realized I wasn’t the only one in the room who was still awake. Everyone was still wide-eyed—except Steve the snorer. From a top bunk came a weary, disembodied voice. “Does anyone want a piece of my Cliff Bar?”
When morning finally arrived, breakfast was disappointing: runny eggs, rubbery crepes, strawberry-flavored custard, and all the Nescafe we could drink! When campers came in to boil water, we eyed their packets of instant oatmeal jealously. Again came the question, this time from David the psychologist, “Does anyone want a piece of my Cliff Bar?”
Lack of luxuries notwithstanding, today’s hike was the longest and steepest of the week—a grueling ascent into a glacial moraine along a rocky trail that went straight up with no switchbacks. To our left, a wall of icy glacier towered thousands of feet above. As we hiked along, avalanches tumbled from unseen heights; a sound of distant thunder signaling a white death to anything in its path. The moraine finally widened to reveal views of jagged peaks piercing the sky like spears.
