Up Pico, and down again

With the sleep still in our eyes we're all making a mad dash for the Pico ferry: "Babette", "Noravind", kids and all, Snorre from "Snorre", "Sedna" and "Vanvara", 11 of us. It's a fast, bouncy ride over to Madelena. The main town at Pico Island.

We find the Pico-tour operators and get our first shock. The price is 35 euros per person. No group prices. A short debate. We agree to pay the non-negotiable price and taxi up to the starting point.
There we meet our guide, a young geology student, Walther. And our group is expanded by the addition of a little, middle aged Portuguese lady with a big curled walking stick and solid boots. She's come from Lisbon to the Azores just to climb Pico.
The drive up gives us a 1200m lift up the mountain. But there are plenty of meters left. We feel each meter climbed, in the thin air and the 40 degree ascent. The scraggily bushes and heather are soon behind us, just hard lava flow basalt, bumpy pumice stone and lots of loose gravel and sand left. We stop at the first grassy plateau, smooth as a putting green, and covered with rabbit droppings. There we get a look down into a dark cave opening, a "bottomless" lava flow tunnel, still to be explored. Our guide provides us with a tale of a hiker who fell into the pit...

We climb on, through wafting fog, then break through the clouds to bright blue skies. Making our way slowly. Walk. Stop and breath. Walk. Stop and breath. Their are lots of stops to catch our breaths in the thin air before we finally make it up to the crater rim, 300 meters in diameter. A fabulous view of a white sea of clouds. And a little bit of Faial's own caldeira in the distance.
In the other direction, an eerie look into the crater, a lunar landscape with mini volcanic cones, black swirls from hardened lava streams, red and black explosion "bombs" strewn over this smooth surface. Steam is trapped under the surface. Pico is only sleeping. It's dormant, not extinct.

A smaller expedition, Anna and Joergen ("Vanvara"), Snorre, Svein Hugo ("Sedna") Oernulf and Shannon go down into the crater bottom, investigate its various holes. Then begin the ascent up "Pico Pequeno" the conical top rising from the crater, to 2351 meters. I stop below the highest steep bit and am content to wait on a shelf while Oernulf and the others pull themselves over the top. It's still quite a way down to the crater rim! Congratulations and photos, then down, across and up to the rim again.

The walk down: At first we're all relieved, there's none of the hard huffing and puffing of the way up. We balance on the hard rock, slide a bit on the loose gravel, slowly make our way down again. Our Portuguese hiker, who eventually made it all the way up, catches up with us now, as we rest our increasingly jelly-like legs. The gravely path becomes more and more treacherous as leg muscles grow tired. We suffer minor falls, scrapes and bruises, as we descend. Will we ever arrive? And will we make the last ferry, at 8pm?
As we go down into the cloud again the fog surrounds us; we have to wait for the Portuguese woman at more and more frequent stops. It's 7pm when we finally arrive at the asphalt road. Hurray! We made it. Groans of relief. Two taxis speed the first group down to the ferry dock. There's an extra ferry leaving now! We rush over, "Noravind", "Sedna" and "Babette", and get into Horta by 8pm. The others won't be leaving Pico before 8:45, when the next ferry goes.
A beer at Peter's, a shower and a good dinner at "Santa Cruz", Pousada Hotel. Where the restaurant is called "Pico View"! Linens and crystal, good food and wine. We digest today's Pico climb. Swearing never to repeat the event in any way or form. We’re off mountain climbing. From now on it's rental cars up to the rim! But I think I'm hearing just a little bit of pride in our voices, too. Telling of today's gruelling accomplishment.

Hey, we did it! We climbed Pico!