- Distance: 16.9km (187.5km total)
- Ascent/Descent: 597m up, 1359m down
- Time: 6 hr 54 min
Oh, that was a fantastic walk. Up through the karst, across three
1900m cols, then down a glacial valley to the village of Lescun.
Bonus were heaps of wildflowers. Boo for the way my karst really
tortured my feet.
Early morning in the refuge, another smokey hazy day from the wildfires far to the east; I wish the wind would shift direction to blow from the west and get all this hazy gray out of the sky. Coffee and bread and butter and jam. Pretty typical. Chris had corn flakes as well, I've been drinking a lot of milk here, but am still wary of the funny way it makes my gut feel if I drink too much. Am I lactose intolerant or not? Let's not find out today.
Past the odd concrete village, looking very 1960s, perhaps Soviet, then up a ski road following the path up to Pic d'Anie with a dozen other hikers. It's early Sunday morning, so le week-end is in full force, but we abruptly turn east on the GR10, a single track for a few km over to the top of another chairlift. It looked easy on the map...
And it wasn't. It was rocky with lots of loose sharp limestone rocks to avoid, skinny fins of stone just ready to gash open your shins if you misstepped, or your hands if you fell down. Took us well over an hour to negotiate the 2km, up and down, past sinkholes, random dirt here and there to slip on.
The wildflowers were the big bonus, unexpectedly. The terrain was so rough that the sheep and cows didn't go grazing, so they were everywhere. Some things I recognized, others I didn't, so I just took a lot of flower pictures of things that caught my eye--that spikey blue flower, a parasitic orchid perhaps, definitely a rose, and many more.
We just had to rest after all of that, a little snack station at a transfer slope between two chairlifts that had one of the old capsule-cars kitted out with a table. It was also out of the wind, which was getting stronger and hotter, my little temp sensor was reporting it was already 26C though we had climbed to 1800m or so.
After our little break, a climb up a first col, where we saw the second col about a km away, then from the second col (not as scary as some of the guidebooks made it out to be) a third and broader and final col to go up and over, before the descent down to Lescun.
That high mountain scenery was superb. Directly to the south was the massive Pic d'Anie, a big vertical chunk, surrounded by tall cliffs, and down in the valley we spied a cabin that supposedly sold cheese and drinks. Well, not today, so we kept descending to the forest for our lunch break--expecting yet another dry baguette of ham and cheese, but no, the refuge had packed a pasta salad, so yum. Better than usual.
Walked another couple of hours down to Lescun--an actual lively village, though this is Sunday--and checked into the hotel a bit before 3. The soles of my feet are really sore from all that balancing earlier today, so I downed 400mg of ibuprofen for the first time this trip, and took a long nap before dinner.
