A Solid Hike and Seeing an Air-Evac

On Saturday Geoff and I again decided to hike the Sangin trail. The weather was 27 degrees and sunny and we  were both keen for the exercise. It was the same trail we usually do and so there's not much new to write about. However, about halfway up we noticed a helicopter flying around very close to the trees. We've seen them before flying around, but never that close to the ground. Anyway it stopped about 50 feet from us and began to lower down right to the trees. We saw a large number of Koreans there (a few taking video with their cell phones of course). We couldn't get too close as the chopper was kicking up a lot of dust, but we saw eight guys come down. We couldn't see exactly what happened but my guess is that someone was airlifted out. After it flew off we walked by and a few men in uniform were talking to a few older guys, who seemed very thankful. We didn't bother to stick around but about fifteen minutes later the chopper came back (maybe to pick up the crew?). It's cool to see something like that in person. The rest of the hike was uneventful, though we found a new trail with a better view of the ridge. We then got down, had food and a beer and called it a day.