Yuji (One of the guys in the group) expressed interest in my side trip idea, basically instead of following the TA along the river, this way would take us up and over the red hills (I don’t know why they are called hills, they are most definitely mountains). There are no marked trails, but I found instructions online on how to navigate them.
We started hiking at 8, it was cloudy but the clouds seemed thin, so I hoped they would burn off.
We passed the first stream and using a combination of compass and GPS we left the trail and started hiking up, which would have been a lot easier if we could have seen where we were going.
As we climbed we got above the clouds giving us spectacular views of the mountains like islands in the clouds.
We followed the ridge up to the tallest mountain, Red Hill at 1791m. We grabbed lunch there before descending into the valley to avoid some dangerous rock hopping on the ridge between Red Hill and the next mountain.
Then we climbed back up the other side and kept going on the ridge crossing several other peaks.
The hike was amazing but really slow going, the rock scrambles just took a lot of time to navigate, particularly as there wasn’t a trail and many of the rocks weren’t stable and rolled when you stepped on them.
As we got closer to the Red Hills hut we found a couple tarns in a field. Yuji proposed camping there and at first I was hesitant, but after thinking about it there was no real advantage to hiking on to the hut, we had a water source, the hut would be full by the time we got there, we had already hiked for 11 hours and the field we were in was absolutely beautiful!
So we made camp about 2.5k from the hut.
It was probably one of my favorite days on the trail and it wasn’t even the actual trail! Yuji was a fantastic hiking partner, very positive and fun, I’m very thankful that he decided to join me.
gorgeous! it looked like a great day.