Trudging along a logging road that cuts between the ridges of the Greater Caucasus mountain range, thousands of Georgians move ever upward, exhausted as they pass beyond the timberline into early winter snowfields.
Once celebrated by 19th-century poets for its pristine beauty and timbered solitude, the mountain region known as Swanetia now threatens to become a burial ground for many refugees.Driven from their homes last week by secessionist fighters in the breakaway region of Abkhazia, thousands of ethnic Georgians have been wending their way up and over the mountains in pursuit of shelter and safety.
The Georgian government estimates that about 70 people have died during the weeklong trek.
The people crossing the mountains are a mix of peasants and professionals, young and old. Any differences between them have been blurred or erased by defeat and by abject misery.
"We have lost everything, everything!" said Vitali Turabilitze, 54, who fled from Sukhumi shortly before separatists broke through the town's defenses.
"The Swaneti have shared everything they have with us, but now they want to run away, too," he said of the local mountaineers.
Turabilitze was camping with his family in a school in the township of Gentzivshi, still hoping that his son, who stayed behind in Sukhumi to guard their house from marauders, might still arrive in the last trickle of refugees working their way out of the maelstrom that enveloped the city on Sept. 28.
When Abkhazian forces swept into the town, President Eduard A. Shevardnadze and the remnants of the Georgian National Guard were forced to flee.
Like many of the refugees, the Turabilitze family fled in a car piled high with food and belongings. The car broke down after it was rammed by a truck on the narrow muddy road into the mountains, forcing the family members to abandon their belongings.
The tree-lined road along the north bank of the Kodori River now looks like an extended junkyard stretching for miles into the mountains. Abandoned cars, jeeps, buses, all stripped, clutter the route to such an extent that passage is often impeded.