Some of you know that i attempted the 'stairway to heaven' trek about a year and a half ago and we didnt make it after losing the path ( you can find that trek here
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/members...en-update.html). Then a week or so later i injured my ankle and have never been back there since. but the fire had always been brewing deep down and i always wanted to do this. its the pinnacle of climbing here in the UAE, and i couldnt not do it.
This past weekend we attempted the climb for the second time. this time i climbed with a different smaller group. Friends who were more accomlished in the climbing sense and had done the trek a few times.
we slept in Ras Al Khaimah ( RAK) overnight and started the trek at 5.00am at 220m above sea level. after walking an hour an a half through a wadi ( a gorge in english) we got to the end of it at 450m above sea level and hooked a left..went up the scree field to 800m above sea level and climbed the rest of the way to 1200m up a cliff face.
i cant begin to explain the sheer terror of looking down an exposed cliff face will give you. whoever said that i have balls is full of shit. i may do all these crazy things, but this is by far the most terrifying. imagine yourself on a cliff face with nothing but you and some rocky stairs and 400m shear drop of cliff face. The stairs were built by bedouin shephards a few hundred years ago. i wonder which engineer passed their set of stairs.
These set of stairs along the cliff face are basically rocks stacked on top of each other where there was no access up the cliff face. the stairs reach another ledge, and from there we'd do some more climbing before another set of stairs popped up.
the trek took 17 hours in total. 5hrs to the top of the cliff face..then another 12 hours to walk around the face of the cliff to go down the other side which is less scarier supposedly but adds 3 times the time to the climb. yes, we started at 5am with headlamps, and we got back to the car at 10pm with headlamps.
i guess ill let the pics explain it. but i now understand why my friends have promised their wives never to go again. i had to keep this trek a secret, and didnt tell she-lish until after i got back.
would i do it again?....i dont know really...no, not unless i get goaded into going.
anyways here are the pics...
the first set of stairs
looking back at our way down on the opposite side of the mountain
this is the cliff face that we climbed
no harnesses of course
can you see the 'staircase'? look closely!
here's a better view
anyone notice the stairs sitting on thin air????
this is me being scared shitless
dont knock the highlighter green shirt..its a saftey mechanism in case we got lost and the helicopter came looking for us
on thin air
and this is us at the top! 5 hrs later
this is what we climbed
taking a rest at the top
we climbed another 400m from the village where the top of the cliff is to 1600m. this is the view from there
view from the top, you can see the ocean from here
a dried waterfall canyon
coming down a dried waterfall canyon
on the way down we took significantly less pics. we were tired and just wanted to get back asap!
coming down a scree slope is much harder than people think.
us negotiating our way down
we got back in the wadi at 7pm ( as the darkness fell on us) and we stumbled back to the car 3 hrs later for a 10pm finish. 17hrs is a hell of a long time to go trekking.