With 9 people (4 couples & me), we planned to go for a hike, close to Prague so we would not loose too much time with travelling, for a hike from Friday afternoon till Sunday afternoon.
One week before 1 couple cancelled as their plans changed.
So we where left with 7 people, and the weather forecast was cloudy, snow up to 15 cm / 5.9 inches, and possibility to have max -17 Celsius / 1.4 Fahrenheit.
During the days before the weekend, all 3 ladies started to be a little sick, but decided still to go on with the planned trip.
Here is what I packed for the trip. Once we started, I left the snowshoe’s in the car, as they where not needed. the snow was dry and not more then 15 cm / 5.9 inches high.
Here is the planned route, start at the green flag, first night at the first orange flag, second night around the second orange flag, and jump on the train back to the car at the red flag.
As soon as we hit the forest, we made a ‘gruppen’ photo.
On the way to the planned place for staying overnight, we took a wrong turn, and after we found out, we decided to make camp at the first best place since it started to be dark already. The couples setup their tents, and I prepared my hammock. The we collected firewood, and a fire was quickly made. Here you see us cooking our food on the fire.
During the evening it was only -8 Celsius / 17.6 Fahrenheit, and during the night it dropped to -10 Celsius / 14 Fahrenheit.
Next morning it was back to -8 Celsius / 17.6 Fahrenheit.
View on the tents of the 3 couples from my hammock.
And here a view on the place where we stayed over, in the middle is the place where we had the fire from around 17.00 till 23.30 hours.
The area was very nice, and the snow made it look very ‘open’.
The others where still sleeping, or at least still in their tents.
I always wake up early, so I had time to make a fire with my trusted firesteel and favorite knife, to cook our breakfast.
Most of our water was frozen during the night, we used snow to make our soup, tea, etc.
Here is my cook pot with a few compressed snowballs in it.
During this moment the others woke up as well and joined the fire.
At breakfast, 1 couple decided to return home, cause the lady became very sick during the night. Also the other 2 ladies didn’t feel great, adn decided was that we would continue without the couple that went home, but only for a certain distance, and in the afternoon return to some train station to go back home. No second night sadly enough.
Time to continue with our trip. We figured out where we went wrong, and chose to continue on this path since it would lead to the path we aimed for, just a bit before it.
Here are a few pictures of the scenery during our hike.
In the afternoon we made another fire, to cook up our remaining meat that we originally had for the evening. The 2 best foods for a hiking trip are bacon and pork meat with salt and pepper prepared above the fire. The bacon was sadly forgotten at home, but we still had lot’s of pork meat with us, plus the additional food like pasta, rice, vegetables, etc.
After we properly put out the fire, we continued direction the closest village.
When we arrived at the village, the train just left, so we had another 30 minutes before the next train would come. As a good tradition, we spend those minutes drinking a nice cold beer in the local pub, to celebrate the “good” end of the trip.
With “good” I mean that the remaining 5 of us made it healthy back since 1 couple left us in the morning due to sickness.
So, the route was much shorter then planned, we did instead of 23 km as planned, only 10.5 km. Here is the track according to my GPS app on my Iphone.
