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There’s a stretch of Mount Triglav, maybe 50 meters below a small wooden hut, where I gripped a rock face with both hands and swore at it.
I was scared in a way I don’t usually get scared. Angry too, which surprised me more. We’d been scrambling for what felt like a very long time across rock that fell away on both sides, and my body had quietly decided it was finished. One wrong foot and I’d slide, and the slide had somewhere bad to go.
So I held on and gave myself a talking-to. Out loud, probably. Get out of the fear. Get out of the anger. Get back in your body, because if you don’t, you’ll come off this face through nothing but lost focus, and you are not doing that to your girls.
It worked. I got present, I found my feet, I climbed the last bit up to the hut. I have never been so happy to see a small ugly building in my life.
That stretch wasn’t the part of the mountain I’d trained for, or chosen, or even knew was coming. It’s the part I think about most.
Triglav is the highest peak in Slovenia, 2,864 meters up in the Julian Alps. It’s on the national flag. There’s a saying over there that you’re not a true Slovenian until you’ve stood on top of it. 50,000 to 70,000 mountaineers climbing it each year, it is one of the most popular mountains in Slovenia. So, when I tell you I climbed Triglav and didn’t summit, I know exactly which mountain I turned my back on.
I’m still not sorry. Let me tell you how that happened, because it’s more interesting than the summit would have been.
We were on a 10-day women’s group trip through Slovenia, 15 of us, run by Your Limitless Adventures. I’ve written the long, honest breakdown of the whole trip elsewhere, what it costs and where it broke. Today it’s one day on one mountain.
We left Lake Bled before dawn. The hotel had packed us breakfast the night before, which was lovely of them, except it was too early for anyone to make coffee. So, several of us hiked up a mountain for 12 hours on no coffee at all. Not one cup. I’m quietly proud that I didn’t even get the headache. Small wins.
An hour’s drive, a parking lot, a huddle with our guides Clemens and Urie, hands in the middle, up on three. Off we went. It started as a pretty walk through forest. Then it started going up, and it didn’t really stop.
I’d made a rookie mistake before I ever left home. I’d been frugal and bought my pack at the last minute, and I somehow convinced myself it had a padded, supportive waistband. It had the clip. It did not have the padding. I carried a 3-liter water bladder up that mountain because I was terrified of running out, and nobody had told us there were two natural springs on the trail where we could have filled up. So, I hauled a heavy, badly balanced pack for hours, and it wore me down more than the climb did.
About an hour in, we stopped. Clemens and Urie pulled Christina aside and told her the truth: we hadn’t hit the hard part yet, and after this it got much steeper, with about five hours still to go. A couple of the women took an honest look at it and decided it wasn’t their day. Urie walked them back down and put them in a taxi. They found a hotel with a beautiful pool and had the kind of afternoon that made the rest of us deeply jealous by nightfall. They were disappointed in the moment. By dinner they were the smartest people on the mountain.
The rest of us kept going up. Through alpine forest with the peaks watching us the whole way. Past a herd of cows. Through a meadow where I fully expected a bear to wander out. And because we walked mostly single file at different paces, I kept ending up next to a different woman every hour, which turned a brutal climb into the best conversations of the trip.
Kim ran a lot of that. She’d lob a question down the line and make us all answer it. Three people, alive or dead, you’d have dinner with. Who and why. Even Clemens, who I think first decided we were a strange bunch of women, eventually joined in.
Mine, if you’re curious: my grandfather on my mother’s side, who died before I was born, who my mum speaks of so tenderly that I’ve missed a man I never met. Wayne Dyer, whose books have shaped 30 years of how I think, and who I cried over when he passed. And David Ghiyam, my Kabbalah teacher these last two years, whose teaching lines up with everything I already believed but couldn’t say out loud yet.
That’s what the hard trail gives you. Hours with nothing to do but talk properly.
We took the Krma Triglav route through the Krma Valley to Triglavski dom (Kredarica Hut / lunch hut). It’s approx. 7,3 kilometers \ 5 miles and ascends 1550m. Usually, it takes us around 5 hours to reach the hut. There is water spring halfway up the mountain, so you can start the hike with 1 or 1,5 liter of water and some snacks for the way. We did not know this and carried too much water!
Then it got steep in a way that stops the talking. The trees dropped away, and it was pure alpine and rock and 360-degree views that I kept stopping for, partly to breathe, partly because I wanted to remember it. Above us I could see the via ferrata summit route, and a line of people on it like ants, scaling what didn’t look like a path at all.
My focus narrowed down to one thing: get to the lunch hut, get the pack off, sit down.
And then my heart started doing something it doesn’t do. Palpitations. I get them very rarely, and this was the first real signal from my body that I needed to pay attention. I don’t know why. Maybe dehydrated, maybe I hadn’t eaten enough. It doesn’t matter. What mattered was that I felt them, and I knew in the same breath that I wasn’t going up the via ferrata.
It was the calmest decision I made all trip. I got to Kredarica Hut, what we called the lunch hut with Ali, we found a little bench with a love heart cut into it, took some happy photos, and I turned to her and said it plainly. Heart palpitations. I’m maxed out. I’ve got nothing left in the tank physically or mentally, I’d be slow, I’d hold the group back, and I’m not going to be the reason anyone else’s day gets smaller. She was supportive, maybe a bit shocked. I felt light as air.
I wasn’t sad watching the others gear up and go. I was thrilled for them. They clipped onto their guides in threes, climbed to the top of the highest mountain in the country, took their photos, came back lit up like Christmas. I got to sit in a warm hut and eat a bowl of cabbage soup that filled the tank and helped me feel a return to normal.
(The hut had a deck out front full of enormous men drinking beer. Turned out to be army veterans at their annual gathering, helicopters coming and going all day, live music, the works. How they’d hiked up there to drink beer, I will never understand. I love a beer. That was another level.)
If the trip had gone to plan, I’d have slept at the hut and done the via ferrata the next morning, rested. I probably would have said yes. Storms were forecast, so the guides moved the summit to the same day as the hike, which was absolutely the right call. Nobody wants to be clipped to a bare rock face when lightning’s about. So, the mountain, in its own way, made my decision easier. It maxed me out first, then asked the question.
Kredarica Hut is located at about 2,515 m in Triglav National Park and is the starting point for the Mali Triglav via ferrata to the summit. The season runs late June through September. July–August is busiest while September often brings the finest, quietest weather. Late June and October are shoulder windows where snow and iced cables can make the via ferrata more serious.
Here’s the part that never made the photo gallery because we needed all our focus (just a couple of photos were captured)
While the summit group climbed, Clemens took the rest of us toward the sleeping hut and promised it would be easier than what we’d just done. Forty-five minutes, gentle, he said.
It was three hours. One of the women christened it the rock tumbler. I called it the Upside Down world, all Stranger Things, because we went down to go up and lost sight of the hut every time we thought we were close. We spider-crawled across rock. We came to an exposed section with iron rungs and cables bolted into the wall, and unlike the via ferrata, we weren’t clipped to anything. There was a snow patch so slick I was sliding until Clemens climbed up and handed me a pole.
And this is the part I’d point you to if you’re trying to understand why these trips work, and why I said yes to leading them. Fifteen strangers held each other together across that rock. Andy, an experienced climber who lives near the North Cascades back home, carried Erynn’s bag up the final section because Erynn was spent and needed one less thing to think about. Clemens carried Syna’s. My own heavy pack somehow stopped mattering, because fear had crowded out everything except getting off that face alive.
Erynn and I got through it on humor. We laughed at the sheer absurdity of it, cracked jokes every time Clemens called down “50 more meters,” which he said at least ten times. Come on, Erynn. 50 more. We can do this. Focus.
And right at the end came my little rock-face moment. The swearing, the anger, the talking-to.
I want to be clear about what pulled me back, because it’s the whole reason I’m writing this down. Fifteen years of near-daily meditation built one muscle in me that I use more than any other. It notices the second I’ve bolted out of the present moment into fear or fury, and it hauls me back into my body. In and out, in and out, every quiet morning, until the muscle is strong enough to work when it counts. On a rock face with a bad drop under you, foot wrong, heart up, three seconds to choose focus over panic, that muscle is the only reason I got calm.
Every one of those quiet mornings was training for that exact moment. The cushion in the living room was only ever practice for the cliff.
Somewhere in the tumbler, I learned something about myself as a leader that I’m still sitting with.
Syna had gotten sick on the way up, before the lunch hut, dizzy and nauseous, pushing through it slowly and bravely. When she reached the hut, all of us ran out and made a canopy with our arms, a tunnel for her to walk through while we cheered her in. She wrote about that later on her Instagram, what it meant to have the women there for her.
She’d wanted the helicopter out at that point. We got food and water into her, and I promised I’d stay at the back with her the whole way to the sleeping hut. And partway through the tumbler she turned to me, color back in her face, and said, “Oh, I’m having fun, this is just like rock climbing.” I got to watch the joy come back into someone who’d been ready to quit an hour earlier. That’s a gift.
Then she stepped down off a ledge, her pole slid out from under her, and she fell. She hit her arm on a rock, gashed it below the elbow, and it bled a lot. Clemens and I worked together on the first aid. He decided she needed the helicopter, this time to guard against infection in an open wound up a mountain. I questioned it. I asked whether we could handle it ourselves, right there. He held firm, and he was the professional, so the helicopter came once we reached the sleeping hut and flew her to hospital.
The women down at the hotel drove to meet her so she wouldn’t be alone, and Urie, one of our guides, went and collected them all afterward without being asked. She was fine. A few stitches, a spectacular bruise, back with us soon after.
But I’ve turned that day over more than once since. I encouraged her to keep walking with us instead of pushing harder for the helicopter earlier. Was that the right call? I think so. She found something on that trail she wouldn’t have found in a hospital waiting room. But I felt the weight of it, the responsibility of being partly answerable for another woman’s body on a mountain, and I haven’t fully put it down. It’s made me want to be better at this. First aid training, for a start. That instinct to second-guess myself is just how I’m built, and on that day it was the right instinct to have.
Cabbage soup, when you’ve earned it, is transcendent. We ate it at picnic tables looking out at the peaks, debriefing, half-terrified about how we’d get off the mountain the next day. The summit group walked in later from a different direction and told us the section they’d been dreading coming down was scarier than the via ferrata itself, so we hadn’t missed the easy option, we’d done the frightening one without knowing it.
That evening we sat together as the sun went down over the Julian Alps and Triglav and shared what we were grateful for and what the day had cracked open in us. Then a fox trotted around the hut while we got ready for bed. The dormitory started cold, so we wore beanies, then turned into a sauna once 15 bodies warmed it up. I barely slept. Too much adrenaline still moving through me.
I was awake at 5. I heard Drea get up and slip outside, and thought, why lie here sweating. So I went out, and Drea was sitting on the step wrapped in a blanket watching the most beautiful sunrise I’ve seen in years.
Pink and red and orange over the ranges. I sat down next to her and we watched it, just the two of us, and said almost nothing. The clouds rolled in not long after and took the whole view. But we’d had it. That quiet half hour is one of my favorite moments of the entire trip, and I nearly slept through it.
The walk down was gentle and green and easy, cows in the pasture, wildflowers brightening the path, storm clouds building behind us, so we picked up the pace. At the bottom, Erynn and I looked at each other, realized we’d actually made it, threw our arms around each other and laughed. Ali watched us do it and told me later she couldn’t stop laughing at the two of us, the way we fell into that hug like we’d survived a war. Urie had written a message in the dust on the back window of the van. “You did it girls.”
Our sleeping hut was Dom Valentina Staniča pod Triglavom (2332 m). From the hut there is great view towards Triglav, the highest peak in Slovenia and to Triglav north side, including triglav glacier (the last piece of the real glacier).
I keep coming back to why I said no on the via ferrata and felt so certain about it.
Part of it is this. I don’t need to chase the extreme anymore. I did that younger, bungee jumping into the Nile and all the rest of it. But 15 years of meditation has settled my baseline into something calm and connected most days, maybe 85% of the time, and I get awe and joy from ordinary things now without having to manufacture the high. I still love an adventure. I jumped off a 6-meter ledge canyoning two days later and would do it again anywhere. I just don’t need to prove anything to a mountain.
And part of it is that I’ve spent my whole adult life outside my comfort zone already. Thirty years of travel. Living in five countries. Running a business that changes under my feet every quarter and has never once given me stability or security. I’m stretched and tested every single day by the life I actually live. Some people take on the extreme because they’ve never had the chance to find their edge. I’ve been living at mine for decades.
I’ll be honest, because the honesty is the only reason to write any of this down. Maybe I’m partly justifying a decision I’d made for simpler reasons. Maybe it’s my age and I just prefer the quiet pleasures now. Maybe on a different route, or the next morning, rested, I’d have gone up. All of that might be true at once. What I know for certain is that when I look at the summit photos the other women share, I don’t feel a flicker of regret. And that, for me, is the only reliable test of whether a decision was yours or someone else’s fear talking. Look back later. Check for the regret. If it isn’t there, you chose well.
There’s one more thing I came home turning over. It’s my job, for 16 years, to record every detail of every trip. On this one I did the opposite. I took fewer notes, fewer photos, and let myself just be there. It’s made writing this harder. I’m chasing down restaurant names I should have jotted down. But it was the right trade, and learning to trust that I can still make something worth reading without gripping every detail is its own quiet lesson.
I love hiking. I love being in the wild. And I love what happens to strangers who go through something hard together at altitude, how fast that turns into a friendship you’ll carry for life even if you never see each other again. What stitches people together is what they survive together. A few hours of real fear at altitude does more than years of comfortable dinners ever could. The women on that mountain are part of me now. That’s the real souvenir.
If you’re thinking of climbing Mt Triglav, and especially if you are not experienced, you will want to go with a guide, Have a look at the following options: 2-Day Guided Climb – Small Group, IFMGA Guide (Get Your Guide), Climb Mount Triglav in 2 Days | IFMGA Guide | From Bled (Viator) and Via Ferratas In Triglav National Park And Julian Alps (Viator)
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