The most obvious problem was that the designers had neglected the extra material required to surmount the rucksack. Thus although it hung to a fairly adequate knee-length at the front, it only just got over the hump of the sack before it ran out at the back. This not only left the majority of the sack exposed, (to say nothing of a considerable portion of one's person), but also made it almost impossible to connect the two sides together. It was therefore a rather nice bib, quite good at keeping the front of your shirt gravy-free, but pretty useless for anything else.
Never mind, the view, when we could see it, was improving by the minute. Although the taxi had given us a two hundred and fifty meter start, today was still twelve hundred meters of climbing, so we knew we had our work cut out for us. Actually, most of the time the slopes were surprisingly gentle, which may explain how we did not notice that after one of the hairpin turns we had managed to drop back to the ascending path, and were now heading back to the start.
Figure 3: Blazing the trail: just follow these signs for ten days
There was much good-humored moaning about going down-hill already, but it was not until we returned to the plastic bag full of rubbish that we had been disgusted by on the way up that we were able to convince ourselves that we really were going the wrong way. Estimates of the lost time vary from ten minutes to the whole of the hour that we had lost by the time we reached the refuge that night. Who knows. What we do know is that we never made that mistake again.
Throughout that first morning the weather remained manageable, and we stopped frequently to pick the blackberries and to savor the views of the clouds forming around the hills. The blackberry brambles began to take their toll on the ponchos, mine in particular. I don't think it ever wanted to make the trip. It flung itself at every passing thorn or rock, and although it did not succeed in getting me to leave it behind, it did develop the knack of leaving strategic pieces of itself on convenient thorns and crags, thereby rendering it ever more useless.
As we crested Bocca U Saltu (1276 m), the first col, and the first steep climb, the weather cleared. It stopped raining and a weak sun peeked out through the heavy clouds. Lunch-time.
