Another trip to Hampaturi to Climb Serkhe Negra

January 10th: rolled out at 5.08am and again went over Pampahasi and again it was raining. In Palcoma I turned right and went over the bridge. I took the small road that goes towards Hati Khollu that I climbed last May, to climb another peak. Soon there was a hill that was so muddy that I couldn't drive up anymore. Maybe I could have cleared it using the 4x4 but my tires are quite slick and the road was so slippery that I didn't even try. And maybe there were similar slippery places further up the road. An old man told me there is another way around that later joins the upper part of the road. So I went back to Palcoma and tried to find the road the old man was talking about but I couldn't find it. Instead, I took a tiny and terrible road for a while but turned back because it was so bad. I was sure that the road up to the lakes was better so I decided to cross the river again and kept going up that way to climb Serkhe Negra.
   I left my car at the Laguna Aiun Khota at 4450 meters and started moving on foot at 7.18am. I had lost 30 minutes in Palcoma. I didn't want to try to drive to Laguna Serkhe Khota at 4800m because I was worried about the road conditions and didn't want to get stuck. That meant I had 3,4 km or over 2 miles more to walk but it was ok. During that walk the sky cleared up and it was sunny but in 30 minutes it would be all cloudy and at times foggy too.  I saw a very easy walk up to the northwestern base of Serkhe Negra and decided to take advantage of it because I had seen one week earlier that the south face of Serkhe Negra doesn't have any snow. It was pretty muddy everywhere that day. I discovered that the north side of the mountain has a wonderful corridor that goes up, first the angle is very easy, but later all four limbs were needed. When this part of the mountain is covered in snow, this could be a nice climb but now only the last 150 vertical meters had snow.

There was a cross at the top (5460m 17,913ft) and I spent at least 20 minutes on the top part of the peak, walking around and looking. Going back it was raining really hard and I hurried to the car knowing that the road gets worse and worse. And it really was a muddy and wet drive for the first 15 minutes and I felt lucky having made it back.