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I had gotten used to the small routines of camping in a remote valley in Kyrgyzstan for weeks, and became endeared to the tiny island in the Kara-Su we pitched our tents on. I wouldn't miss cooking with gasoline, but it warmed up the canned cow and ramen just fine and was all I really had to complain about.
Alix decided to leave with Kevin and I, and we hiked out via a different route than the one we used inbound. The trail was specked with the ghosts of ancient villages, shepherd huts long out of use, and skeletons of Soviet infrastructure- military, mining, or otherwise. It was slightly eerie at times, and at all times beautiful. Rather than going up and down many passes, we mostly stuck near the bottom of the steep gorge of the Karavshin River. At one point, the trail disappeared into a loose slope that had slid straight down into the river, before appearing on the other side. Our guides grabbed a pick-ax and a shovel from their horses and got to work cutting a new grade above where the slope had slid. We could see then the many previous grades, softened with age, cut into the slope below the one that had very recently fell. I was fascinated at the age of this route, and with the readiness at which our leaders repaired it. How many iterations of this riverbank have been known? After crossing the slope ourselves, we watched the horses, laden with haulbags, unhappily stumbling across a line that is certainly no longer there.