9th October: Day 7
Today: 12 miles – 4,375ft ascent; Cumulative: 127 miles, 35,855ft ascent
First day into the High Pyrenees. I don’t see a single person all day.
I stop early at a big refuge – it’s closed, but it has a ‘winter room’ underneath that’s left open in the off season. It feels like sleeping in the ruins of a civilization that once holidayed in these mountains – a relaxing sense of post-apocalypse.
Viene una tormenta…
He said ‘a storm is coming’
10th October: Day 8
Today: 23 miles – 7,405ft ascent; Cumulative: 150 miles, 43,260ft ascent
I’m running low on food. Originally planned to pick up more in Lescun, but that failed. The alternative is the shop in the small ski resort town I pass through today.
Not for the last time, I’m caught by being between seasons – too late for summer walking season, too early for skiing – the shop is closed.
The next shop is 50 miles away, and I’ve probably got two more days of food, at a stretch.
I do a long day and go to sleep wondering whether the shop in 50 miles will actually be open, and how unpleasant the next few days are going to be to get there.
In the end, after the indignity of the last time I came across the Camino, it will be the Camino that returns to save me this time.
11th October: Day 9
Today: 13 miles – 5,092ft ascent; Cumulative: 163 miles, 48,352ft ascent
I’ve crossed the border 5 times in the last 2 days, no idea what country I’m in now. I’ve learnt it’s better to always say ‘bonjour’ rather than ‘hola’ – the Spanish seem pleased to see me either way, and the French just seem fractionally less disappointed.
The last crossing is a scramble, and I’m high up when a storm rolls in and drops a bucket of ice water on me. Without a working raincoat, and perhaps now not having eaten as much as I might have liked due to food shortage, I’m once again in a degree of thermal stress, but I can’t put my tent up on this high ridge to escape.
Eventually I tumble out of the mountains, and find myself on the reverse Camino de Santiago for a second time. This time I’m grateful – there’s no off season on the Camino apparently, and that means the mountain refuge ahead is open all year. Instead of shivering myself to sleep in my tent, I’m soon drinking an ice cold beer.
12th October: Day 10
Today: 16 miles – 6,762ft ascent; Cumulative: 179 miles, 55,114ft ascent
At the refuge yesterday I was able to buy what I would describe, to this day, as the worst chocolate the world has ever produced. And that includes the already genre-pushing Hershey’s ‘chocolate’.
However, it does contain calories and therefore does solve my food shortage.
Today is the climb up the side of Vignemale, which is impressive. Someone tells me the story of the Victorian explorer Count Henry Russell, who stayed many nights up on the mountain. He had three caves made up there – one for him, one for his butler, and one in case he had a lady to entertain. The cave would be decorated with wall hangings, and table set with linen and candles.
I can’t help but feel, as I eat hugely suspicious chocolate in the dark, that thru-hiking has gone downhill since those days.
Switchbacks up the centre of the photo, and then over the pass, which is the notch at the top, right of centre.
Vignemale – 10,820ft (to the summit, which I didn’ go to)
At the top of the pass.
13th October: Day 11
Today: 14 miles – 3,167ft ascent; Cumulative: 193miles, 58,281ft ascent
I reach Gavarnie.
In the morning I’m thinking: great, I can buy some nice food, sleep in a bed, have a shower, and buy a new raincoat that’s actually waterproof.
But I’m quite wrong, I can’t have any of those things.
By the evening I’m camped in the hills the other side of Gavarnie, watching a big storm roll in, clutching my new raincoat and pretending to be confident that it is waterproof, even though it’s made by a company I’ve never heard of, out of a material I’ve never heard of. The label is in French, but the picture shows a cross section, with arrows running through the material to water droplets on the other side. I assume this is extolling its cutting edge breathability – 5 minutes into tomorrow’s storm I will realise that in fact it is advertising its groundbreaking level of water permeability – only precision engineering could create a material that allows rain to travel through it this quickly.
14th & 15th October: Day 12 & 13
Day 12: 18 miles – 6,204ft ascent
Day 13: 11 miles – 1,033ft ascent
Cumulative: 222 miless – 65,518ft ascent
Short version: it’s cold, it’s raining, I camp, it snows, I wonder if I’ll survive, I do survive, I buy some nice chocolate.
Long version:
One of the hardest days of any trip I’ve done.
Heavy rain. My coat is not waterproof, but at least my rain mittens are, I think.
Water runs down my arms on the inside of the coat and fills the mittens with water from the inside. Hmm.
I imagine it’s an odd sight to see me walking around with my hands in little sacks of water, which I have to stop and empty occasionally. Luckily I’m the only one stupid enough to be out in this.
As I get higher, I get colder. I don’t want to stop because I know this storm is forecast to put a couple of feet of snow on the tops tonight. I’m aiming for a shelter that would be a better place to be in the snow.
But after 8 hours in the rain, as I edge around a sort of massive amphitheatre in the mountains, I get stopped at a waterfall/river in spate. I don’t think I can get through, but by the time I’ve stopped to think about it I’m too cold and have to quit anyway, and put my tent up.
I get inside just as the snow starts. It will snow for maybe 10 hours. My tent isn’t rated for the snow.
150 miles ahead of me is a german thru-hiker going through the same experience – we will meet in a week and share the story with a sense of relief and mild trauma. Our description is the same: like lying in a coffin being buried alive. You can see the snow level rising slowly on the tent wall, hour after hour, wondering if the tent will hold, or if you’ll be buried.
If only I’d made it to the shelter, I think – I will find out tomorrow that actually that shelter had burnt down 15 years ago.
I stay awake, pushing the snow off the tent every now and then. In the early hours of the morning, the thunder starts. Eventually I realise it isn’t thunder – it’s the sound of snow crashing down from the top of the amphitheatre, a series of minor avalanches that will last the rest of the night.
I can only think of one other time when I so seriously thought that this might be the end for me.
In retrospect it may have been the walk out to escape from here the next day that was more dangerous for avalanche risk – the snow so loose that with only a gentle wind the snow was rolling down, snowballing into larger and larger cylinders of snow.
But I do survive, and eventually make it down to a highway on the border. There’s a shop there and it sells me some nice chocolate, so, in the end, it was all worth it.
The amphitheatre – you can see where the waterfall/river stopped me, and I turned back to find somewhere to put up my tent.
The next morning. The ground was white, the air was white, the sound was sort of deadened. Even though little light was getting through, I had to put sunglasses on to try to help distinguish ground from air – I just walked straight into things a few times.
Phew, escaped – 5 miles on from the amphitheatre, now out of the snow.
16th & 17th October: Day 14 & 15
Day 14: 14 miles – 4,869ft ascent
Day 15: 20 miles – 5,719ft ascent
Cumulative: 256 miles – 76,106ft ascent
For tax reasons, the shops on the border are all like airport duty free. I head back into the mountains with 3kgs of Milka.
This is a fantastic day of snow, ice, autumn colours, and the Portuguese…
I stay in an shelter / bothy in the mountains. At 9 or 10pm an enormous armour plated looking 4×4 rolls up from the forest road at the back, and some guys come out shining their torches into my face.
After a few seconds of mild apprehension, they turn out to be wandering Portuguese adventurers – and I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone who was more excited to meet me.
They’re clearly not expecting to find anyone up here in the mountains, and at night. I’m sitting outside the bothy, all my kit is inside, so I probably look an even more unlikely character. Just sitting in the middle of nowhere, breaking pieces off a kilo bar of Milka.
They ask some questions about the bothy – is it mine, can other people stay there. They seem stunned by my existence.
Then they excitedly tell me about their trip – they are driving from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean through the Pyrenees in the last Portuguese 4×4 to be built – 30 years ago.
I tell them I’m doing something similar – except walking.
If this is possible, they are even more stunned. One guy looks up at the jagged snow covered mountains ahead, and back at me.
‘You are very brave’ he says, doubtfully.
I try to explain that I’m not going where he’s looking exactly, but that doesn’t shake their strong and somewhat forcefully expressed doubt in my ability to continue to exist.
It will also turn out not to be true – I am going up there, I’m just looking at the map wrong at this instant. (Which probably wouldn’t have done much for their confidence)
Before they leave, they each have a photo taken with me. I find this totally hilarious.
‘You want these photos to show people when you read about my death in the news?’
Yes – is broadly the answer.
Obviously they had grossly exaggerated the danger I was in – but it always cheers you up on an adventure to know that someone else thinks you might die ;-). (Or, perhaps, validates your claim it is an adventure rather than a holiday?)
18th October: Day 16
Today: 15 miles – 4,596ft ascent; Cumulative: 271 miless – 80,702ft ascent
Hard scramble through a boulder field. Very tricky covered in snow – you don’t know where is boulder, and where is a gap/crevice that your foot will drop into, through the snow.
50 miles to the east the German thru-hiker is also scrambling through a boulder field. When we meet we share the story of getting through these in the snow.
She seems quite traumatised by it- and I assume the reason I’m not is obviously because I’m much tougher than her. But I’ll understand the truth when I reach her boulder field in a few more days: it is far worse than the one I’m in today, even though there is no snow for me by then – with some of the gaps 4 or 5ft deep.
I’ll complain more about that in due course… 🙂
19th October: Day 17
Today: 26 miles – 5,650ft ascent; Cumulative: 297 miles – 86,352ft ascent
To Salardu.
Another storm. I’ve been experimenting with how to make my coat better in the rain. The weakest point is around the rucksack straps. Some plastic around there might make a big difference.
I only have the ziplock bags I’d been carrying biscuits in. I tape them in position with leukotape. After I’ve taped them, I realise they still have crumbs in them… Nevermind, no one is around to see that.
However, much later, as I burst through the door of the only open bar in the off season ghost town of Salardu, and look into the startled eyes of its inhabitants, I realise that is no longer true.
It’s dark, I’ve been walking for two hours in heavy rain, I’m wearing a raincoat that looks like it’s made of cotton, I haven’t showered in a week, I haven’t had a rest day in 17 days, and I’ve got small bags of biscuit crumbs taped to my shoulders.
‘What is happening and why is it happening here?’, their silence seems to say.
We have no common language, but one thing my appearance does help with: its clear to everyone I’m looking for a bed and a shower.
End of part 1 of the High Pyrenees.