The Haute Route Pyrenees, one year on | Pinnacle Newsletter #80
#80 The Haute Route Pyrenees, one year on
The August 2020 issue of The Great Outdoors magazine is now on sale, and in it you’ll find my big feature on hiking the Haute Route Pyrenees. My piece, ‘The Light Within’, is about disillusionment with ultralight backpacking, finding meaning in what we like to call adventure, and engagement with the natural world as a form of love. It’s also about a massive walk in the mountains. I’m pleased with how this feature has turned out, so I very much hope you all enjoy reading it. You can order a copy of the magazine here.
I’ve been reading through my journal a great deal this week, as it’s now been a year since I started my walk. Reading the journal and viewing my photos has been bringing it all back. This is partly because I kept an unusually detailed journal on this trip. On average I spent about 90 minutes writing each evening, and wrote about 1,000-2,000 words, capturing details that I would otherwise have forgotten (including entire conversations in some cases). I first began this style of trail journaling on my 2019 Cape Wrath Trail and it has transformed my experience on big walks. Writing and walking merge and become one.
Below I have reproduced my entire journal entry for the 25th of July, unedited and in full. I hope you find it illuminating. It’s about 1,400 words in length, so if you’d just like my usual links of recently published work, please scroll on past it!
Thursday 25 July – Day 10
Location: Ibon de las Ranas (Variant 2)
Distance hiked: 22.5km / 253.7km
Weather: More of the same, until thunderstorm 1730-1845. Finding coping with the heat challenging.
Gear notes: Had to put trouser legs back on for last hour to protect sunburnt legs. Wore waterproofs for first time in thundery downpour; trousers performed well.
iPhone battery used: 11% (no signal at any point today)
It’s most definitely been a day of two halves. I got up before 6am as usual – climbers were already leaving their bivvies & heading for the wall – and after filling up on water I got going by 7. Quite a few trekkers were also heading down the valley, a steady stream of them. In fact, I’ve only had about 30 minutes of genuine solitude today at all.
It was a fairly cool morning as I descended. Soon I entered shady beech forests where the air shimmered with the silk tendrils of a thousand abseiling caterpillars – quite a sight to behold as the morning light picked out these silver strands. The ground was covered in blue flowering thistles. Only the distended corpse of a cow, shockingly white and leathery, disturbed the serene atmosphere. Curiously there are few vultures in these lands.
The final descent to the road felt an awful lot like the descent from Coire nan Lochan in Glen Coe, complete with busy car park. As I began to climb again, a sign cheerfully informed me that there was a 1,100m haul to the next col (Col d’Arrious). At about 0920, some way up this ascent, the hot sun finally hit me, and I lathered on sun cream as usual. I was climbing well by this point though. I saw some very large and very beautiful moths – white or very pale yellow, with black and gold spots on the wings.
There were two false cols on this route. I was overtaken by the same American backpacker I’d seen yesterday, except that today he was shirtless, showing off an impressive (and tanned) physique, and running uphill, his threadbare GoLite pack bouncing on his shoulders. He wore iridescent sunglasses and a cocky smile. I could see the toes through a hole in one of his shoes, but he wore neon-green Dirty Girl gaiters.
‘Yo!’ he said as he sped past, but then he skidded to a halt, as if seeing me for the first time. ‘That an Atom Pack?’ What’s your BW?’
By that I knew he meant base weight, so I told him 6.2kg.
A sharp intake of breath. ‘Anything over 4.5 is overkill on this trail. I’m carrying 4.’
I eyed his pack, and even though I knew I’d regret it, I asked him what kind of tent he carried.
‘A tent’s a waste of weight,’ he declared. ‘Me, I just carry a bivvy. If it rains I crash in a hut.’ Probably a fair enough tactic on the HRP, to be honest.
He deigned to slow down to my pace and we talked further as we hiked. His trail name was Bobcat (real name Larry), he didn’t believe in sleeping pads, and told me that stoveless is ‘so 2016’ (it’s all about the Esbit, apparently). He talked about trends a lot, and I formed the opinion that he was an influencer when it turned out that half of his base weight was electronics.
I asked him if I could take his photo. His eyes lit up. ‘For the ’Gram? Tag me, right?’
‘No, for the magazine article I’m working on.’
‘Then no way, bro,’ he said, although not in an unfriendly way. ‘Legacy media. The ’Gram’s where it’s at.’
As we were speaking, a woman hiker carrying a colossal 1980s framed rucksack overtook us at speed, saying ‘Ola.’
Larry – Bobcat – said ‘Son of a bitch.’ Then he checked his GPS watch. ‘Gotta get in those miles. Have a good hike.’
And off he went. The strange thing is, you’d expect a character like that to be my age or younger, but I’d place Larry at 45+.
At just before 1100 I reached the Col d’Arrious (2,259m) and the turnoff to the Passage d’Orteig, with signs warning how technical it is. As I approached the scramble, a wiry female ultra-runner overtook me and sprinted along the cable-equipped section, which took a rising traverse up a sheer rock face. It actually wasn’t that technical – a lot like Jack’s Rake in Langdale – but very polished, & with some exposed moves. At the other side of the passage, I emerged at the best alpine landscape I’ve seen so far on the HRP. The cirque around the Lacs d’Arremoulit was jagged and wild: acres of rock, with the odd snowbed to catch the eye. The lakes themselves were a rich, sparkling shade of turquoise. Only dams at the lake outflow – and of course the busy refuge – skewed the sense of wildness. Here I diverted from the ‘standard’ HRP and began Variant 2, a more direct route via Col de la Fache. This variant began by climbing Col d’Arremoulit (2,440m, the highest I’ve been on the trip so far). It was not a hard climb, and I found some solitude for the first time today, but I got to wondering whether the cairns along the trail were themselves eroding the sense of solitude, and whether or not that mattered.
On the other side of the col, the sun was fierce and the heat intense as I descended steeply into Spain. Stupendous views of a truly massive mountain wall: that of Balaïtous (3,144m), where dead or dying glaciers clung on in the upper cirques. I started to realise that the backs of my calves were now very sore. In previous days I’d convinced myself that these were mostly horsefly bites, but I could deny it no longer: the calves of both legs, and also around the ankles, are badly sunburnt – despite my diligence with sun cream. I suffered on for a while more, then decided to put trouser legs back on to protect the burnt areas. This was still sore, of course, only now due to abrasion and pressure from the fabric.
As the descent wore on, despite the wonderful alpine landscape I felt more and more grumpy, and by about 1600 I was definitely having a low moment. There seemed to be crowds everywhere (I was back on the GR11), it was the hottest part of the day, my legs were hurting, and I was feeling a vague queasiness and lethargy – possibly from the sunburn, possibly due to my terrible diet, which since leaving Lescun has consisted of stale bread, cheese that has been heated to the temperature of the sun’s surface, and salted peanuts. Originally I’d been tempted to push on to Refuge Wallon today, but that was out of the question now. I could see Col de la Fache (2,664m) ahead, which I’d have to traverse, and realised it was best left for tomorrow.
I passed several dammed lakes in gorgeous alpine surroundings, and another busy-looking refuge. The mountains ahead were all pleasingly pyramidal as if drawn by a child. Soon I was looking for somewhere to camp, and found a good spot by the Ibon de las Ranas, a small natural lake in between two reservoirs. An older Spanish woman named Catherine also wanted to camp here – it’s a big spot – and we chatted for a while. She is thru-hiking the GR11, but struggling to achieve her mileage targets due to the heat. She seemed impressed when I said that I was hiking the Haute Route, and said, ‘That trail is very hard going. My friend, she attempt it but give up!’ I said that I had diverted along the GR11 today partly because I was also finding it difficult.
As we were chatting, at about 1730, dark clouds began to build from the south and we heard a rumble of thunder. Catherine said the meteo had given thunder for around seven, and suggested we return to the refuge, but I voted to wait it out. I just had time to put sensitive items inside my pack liner and pull on waterproofs before the storm hit. Though no lightning hit nearby, we’d both put poles some distance away as a precaution, and sat huddled on our respective rocks as the rain sluiced down. It was a slow-moving storm and wasn’t really past until nearly 1900, when hot sunshine resumed its usual service and dried everything out in minutes. We put our shelters up while the last of the stormclouds cleared the peaks.
Back up into the high alpine tomorrow, although a fairly short day I think. Three more days to Gavarnie. I hope my food supplies hold out!
In other news…
After months of work, I have completed my Secret Outdoor Book Project. I’m still not at liberty to disclose more, but some of you are contributors, and I’m pleased to be able to announce that it will be published in September. As soon as I can make a less mysterious announcement, I will!
Work on The Farthest Shore, my non-fiction book about hiking the Cape Wrath Trail, is almost complete. Vertebrate Publishing are expecting the finished manuscript at the end of August. I’ll be spending the next few weeks polishing my prose.
Recently published
It’s been too long since my last newsletter, so I have plenty of links for you. To keep the list manageable, I haven’t included my weekly reading list links; these can be found on my blog. You can also find several new blog posts on local nature and wildlife photography.
Features and outdoor blog posts
I have a major feature on hiking the Haute Route Pyrenees in the August 2020 edition of The Great Outdoors, which is on sale now.
The Value of Things – a photographic feature for On Landscape magazine on my personal local work.
How to get started with digital navigation – first published in print, this is a digital navigation primer for The Great Outdoors magazine.
Field notes: Back to Basics in Torridon – blog post accompanying my June 2020 TGO feature on hillwalking in Torridon, including some images that didn’t make it into print.
Book and gear reviews
Book review: Greenery by Tim Dee – one of my top reads so far this year.
Book review: The Unremembered Places by Patrick Baker – a fantastic book about hidden Scotland.
Gear review: Therm-a-Rest Vela 20F two-person quilt – a lightweight backpacking quilt for couples.
Book review: Keeping Dry and Staying Warm by Mike Parsons, Mary Rose, Chris Townsend, Chuck Kukla, Alan Hinkes and Marian Parsons – the definitive guide on outdoor clothing.
One-minute mountains
Bite-sized introductions to some of Britain’s best-loved hills. I have a long-running series of these going on UKHillwalking.
Fairfield
Until next time,
Alex
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