Saturday, December 6, 2008

An unplanned stop


My last entry was something of a cliffhanger, and I had actually planned on writing the next entry immediately after finishing the first, but time kind of slipped away.
Anyway, after our last night of navigation in the south my partner and I had finished around 4 in the morning. We immediately proceeded to catch up on whatever sleep we could while we waited on the bus for everyone else to finish. As it turns out, the last group finished around a quarter to 6. Everything was loaded onto the bus and we began the journey back to the base. After about five minutes the bus came to an abrupt stop and we were all ordered to get off!
We all put our vests back on and opened up two stretchers. Two of the members of my team who had some injuries were placed on the stretcher and we began the run/hike. No one really knew how long we would be going or what our eventual destination was (and it was probably best we didn't know).
We ended up carrying the stretchers for about two hours (there were about 11 of us, plus two on the stretchers, which meant that there were not many people to change out for breaks). The end of the hike was a mountain top that was so steep we essentially had to crawl up it while dragging the stretchers around our ankles. I am going to try and put up some pictures later, but they don't really do it justice because I didn't get any pictures that show how steep of a climb we had.

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