Bariloche Part 3

So, the last full day in Bariloche, I was bound and determined to get some outdoor exercise. So, I met up with my New Zealand friend, and I headed out with Ashley to the mountains. We took a bus to Cerro Catedral which is the ski slope outside of Bariloche, and we started hiking from Village Catedral up towards a refuge/shelter up in the mountains. The trail was supposed to be a low level trail that only took 4 hours or less up and 2 or so to get back down. They lied. After a bit of time, Ashley turned back. I, on the other hand, being stubborn... continued with my adventurous New Zealand friend. We crossed river after river and waterfall after waterfall. The terrain just kept getting worse. With the two past weeks being only rain everyday, all of the bridges were washed out, and we were trying to hop across the water skillfully without plunging to the depths below. After we both sunk in mud a couple of times, we decided that the skillful corssing probably wasn't such a big idea, and we began to just trudge through. The mud got worse, there were fallen trees all over, and it was in general just a huge dangerous but fun mess. We hiked for HOURS, and far after the time allotted for reaching the refuge passed, we decided we were not going to reach that refuge before dark, and we still had to get out of those mountains. We could see all of the snow capped peeks, and it literally looked like a scene out of lord of the rings. It was magnificent, but it had started to rain the slightest bit, and we had heard that as soon as it begins to rain you have about 10 minutes to get out of the mountains before the creeks rise and you can't get out, so we took off down from the mountains. At one point, I was crossing a mud flat, and I thought I was stable, when I fell into the mud and sunk in over my knees and lost my shoes. I then proceeded to rock climb my way out of some frightening positions. Shortly thereafter, we saw some other hikers, and they literally ha mud from their heads to their toes. It was hysterical. We realizes that it was taking us so long to get down that we would miss our bus and we would be stuck in the dark in the cold all wet, so we made the executive decision to run our way out of the woods. So, we ran, and we ran, and what took us 45 minutes to hike in, we ran out in 7 minutes. As we came down the last part of the trail we could see the bus pulling in, so my New Zealand super in shape friend sprinted to stop it just in time. We boarded the bus looking like we had liked in the woods for 10 years. It was an incredible adventure...