Dispatches from the European Arctic: Equation of the Day

[(Columbia Plateau + the Grand Canyon) x 10,000] – (sage + coyotes) + (giant lobelia + baboons) = Simien Mountains

That’s the best I can do, in a nutshell.

I don’t have the time, nor the room, to adequately describe our 4 day adventure in the Simien Mountains, except to say that it was indeed a grand adventure. Complete with immense, indescribable views, plenty of endangered wildlife sightings, endless golden plateaus covered with the odd Giant Lobelia, kind highland men (our guide, our scout and our cook) who shepherded us up and down 13,000-foot ridges (our high point was 13,800 feet) and little highland boys trying to make a birr or two serenading the occasional tourist on their homemade masenkos (a traditional one-string lute they had made from discarded water bottles.)

Our cook, Ismae

Nancy and our guide, Fantaye

Our intrepid scout, Bilae

Oh! And I almost forgot The Emergency Mule. Far be it from me to forget long-suffering Gratch and his endlessly patient and nearly toothless owner, without which Nancy would not have completed the trek.

Gratch and the mule man

Nancy on her faithful emergency mule

I’ve included a few photos here although, of course, I have hundreds. And I’ll leave you with this, which says everything far better than I can.

Walia Ibex lives only in the Simien Mtns.

As the air thins, each step became a pain . . . However, on seeing what we had conquered I forgot everything else. We were now at 13,800 feet, and directly beneath the northern verge of this plateau lay a fierce, somber scene of geological anarchy. One fancied that at the time of creation some basic law had here been forgotten—and nothing grew or moved amidst the grotesque desolation of these riven mountains . . .

While devouring a pound of dried apricots I sat on a sweep of burnt-gold, springy turf, where low bushes covered with daisy flowers grew between sheets of pale grey rock, and scores of ten-foot giant lobelias looked incongruously like dwarf palms. Their long, shiny, pale green leaves glinted in the sun, making sparks of silver light all over the summit, and through the enormous silence came the faint, fairy-like chiming of the wind in those leaves. There is an overwhelming integrity about the silence of such places; in its purity and power it differs utterly from the noiselessness of even the remotest inhabited regions. This afternoon’s silence seemed no less tangible than the crags around us.

~~Dervla Murphy, In Ethiopia With A Mule