The Peaks of Shala Part IV

"Anything can happen in the mountains of Albania," I said, picking up my staff and rising, for the shadows of the western mountains were already climbing up the cone-shaped pinnacle of Pog.

In which I retrace Rose Wilder Lane’s 1921 trek through the Albanian Alps as written in her travel memoir, The Peaks of Shala. For previous installments, you can read Part I, Part II, and Part III.

After Turkish coffee, our guide, Errand, breaks the news to our group (One Austrian woman, a Dutch couple, and me) that the real switchbacks (as opposed to those fake switchbacks we’ve been climbing?!?!?) lie ahead.

Errand does this, I’ve noticed. Carefully parse bad news. In this case, right after we’ve pounded mugs of steaming hot, highly potent Turkish coffee.

“I know! I know!” I say, jacked on caffeine and Albuterol. “And then we hike down into death!”

Errand has been repeating “hike down into death” like a mantra. Oohhhhhhmmmm. Deaaattthhhhhhh.

Zoë, the Dutch woman, glances at me sideways but doesn’t say anything. She isn’t going to die. But who knows with these Americans?

When Rose hiked this side of the (Islamic) mountain (the other side is Christian), she also drank Turkish coffee!

After a cup of Turkish coffee, each—to walk another twenty miles over the Albanian mountains, through the Wood of the Ora, and the tribal lands of the Chafa Bosheit to the next village.

By the way, the Ora are wood sprites, and…wait, what?

Did Rose say another TWENTY MILES? 6.2 more miles make a marathon. Rose must have meant over a period of days. Right? Although with Rose, no one knows; she’s never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Infamously, in Little House on the Prairie, the distance Pa walks from the claim to the nearest town, Independence, is cited as the gaspable distance of 40 miles. The actual distance is much less. (Although Laura might have been the origin of this exaggeration for having sincerely believed this to be the distance, and again, the LHOP books are fiction. Anything goes in fiction.)

To be fair, when’s the last time you walked 5 hours x 2 for a bag of sugar?

For sure, Rose hiked a very, very, very long way, and Albanians might have been opaque in their destination estimations. If yesteryear’s Albanians function anything like today’s Albanians, time and distance exist in fuzzy parallel dimensions compared to American Midwesterners. Close. Far. Soon. A “while” from now. Twenty mountain goats over the “hill.” Only Albanians know what these measurements mean

My research put this (modern) hike at 17 kilometers or 10.6 miles, 4.5 miles shorter than my previous distance record set in Zion National Park nine years ago.

A sensible person might question a paid guide who keeps saying he’s leading her to the end of life, but my Catholic parents broke me of questions a long time ago. Wear this. Eat that. Go to school here. In my junior year of high school, it was only when the plane landed in Japan—

私は自分の運命を受け入れることを学びました.

True story.

My other problem is I’ve spent too much time with poets. I interpret everything as metaphor, like the language of the Tamarians in Star Trek: Shaka. When the walls fell. (Yes. I am a bit of a Trekkie. Don’t quiz me, though.)

In this case, “Kelly. When she walked down into death.”

Should I worry literally?

Granted, these stats come from the U.S. National Parks, not Albania. Most deaths come from drowning or motor vehicle crashes. And 70% are men. And the chances are one in a million.

But before we go down into death or anywhere else, we hike up.

And up. And up.

Thanks to Zoë, who took these pics. The man is her partner, whose name I thought would be in our WhatsApp group text but isn’t. Susi from Austria wears the turquoise scarf. I’m the trudger in the floppy hat.

Over the past hundred years, this trail has evolved from a remote mountain pass to a popular tourist hike. As I join the chain gang of outdoor enthusiasts, I’m relieved for the safety net of people but also disappointed to find myself wending in a line.

I know what you’re thinking: Is this woman afraid for her life or complaining that her hike isn’t adventurous enough?

Yes and yes.

Libra life is complicated.

I can’t help but wonder what it was like to be Rose, one of a handful of non-Albanians with two mountain guides, and the undercover Secretary of the Interior hiking “another” twenty miles?

Wet, apparently.

It was not rain; the sky was like one enormous waterspout…We gasped with the shock of it; water poured down our faces, and in an instant, there was not one dry inch of skin on our bodies.

Rose describes the rain as a “million little white teeth” and “battle of roaring water” fighting the group as they enter a narrow chasm, then climbing out through a three-foot wide wall of stone pathway that one of their guides had carved themselves.

During this trek, Rose claims the days in the mountains had toughened them, and they “quickly warmed,” “clutching streaming staffs in dripping hands.”

Here’s where we have to stop and admire Rose. Even if we don’t have exact mileage, she hiked many, many miles in a torrential downpour. Rose was tough. We have to give her that. I’m more like her expedition partner, Frances, the one in every group wondering if “we’re there yet” and when we’re going to eat.

Picture of the Accursed Mountains from The Peaks of Shala

Rose and the group hike through a stream, about a foot deep, before finding a natural cave in a “bowlder,” where it’s dry enough to light cigarettes. Albanians by the way, still smoke today. The ashy smell is, in a weird way, the comforting smell of my 70s Alabama childhood.

After the smoke, they had “only fifteen miles up the beds of streams, across damp expanses of green and crimoson and gray-blue shale, and along narrow ledges suspended between two vaguenesses of gray.”

We go up, too. The trees turn from deciduous to conifer. The switchbacks wend and wend. Bless the Turkish coffee, which pushes my butt up the mountain.

I find it’s better in these situations to forget the distance and see what the ground has to offer. Aren’t the flowers pretty?

I follow Errand on Instagram and have since witnessed how these Accursed Mountains are often wet, as evidenced by smiling groups in rain ponchos. But that Saturday, as you can see, Ora the wood sprite blessed us with perfect weather, sunny and crisp.

Which can only mean (again, I blame too many whiskys with poets) that I will die ironically, the bright beams of Helios highlighting my descent into the rocky depths.

But until such time, we can bask.

We sat on a grassy knoll that seemed to be the edge of the world, so far below it the valleys lay, and listed while the men of the tribes that were “in blood” talked easily together of unimportant matters and offered one another cigarettes.

Next: Part V. The ascent! Will we ever arrive in Death?