- Distance: 24.0km (256.4km total)
- Ascent/Descent: 1754m up, 1446m down
- Time: 11 hr 34 min
Oh, a good long tough day. Not un-doable. Just long.
Some pictures (just dumping them right now, gotta add more tomorrow)
The hotel in Gabas was kinda grubby, dirty, and a mouse scuttled under the bed all night, while the occasional vehicle on the road 10m below our open window would run over a loose manhole cover, clop-clop, clop-clop. Again, we were on the top floor, and heat rises, so we left the windows open to try and cool off. It wasn't until 3am or so that I actually pulled up the blanket, until then I just sprawled on the sheets and ignored the flies that would land on me every ten minutes. At least were out of heavy farm country, so there's only half the usual flies.
Breakfast early at 6:30. We knew it was a tough day, about 15 miles and 5700' elevation gain, though we really don't think in those units anyomre. We were both concerned about the forecast rain, so we packed all the rain gear, and then scooted up the trail as soon as it became feasible, it's not really light enough to walk until after 7am.
Yeah, it was cloudy and misty and overcast, feh, feeling more like hiking somewhere near Seattle, lots of dripping from the trees and moss covered rocks. The first 5km or so were easy-ish, with the exception of some nasty uphill intrusions.
After those logging roads, the track took on a wild personality--first a walk along a 'cornice',
with warnings not to do it in the rain (there were chains to grab onto, a sure sign of scary).
It wasn't that scary because it was so foggy, so we couldn't really see down to our certain
death below in the roaring gorge. Just a bit meh as we ascended to 1300m.
Around here, 1300m still means beech forest, and the track didn't care, it made sure we went up and up because there are so many roots to create foothills. Finally around 1600m the trees fell away, and the clouds kinda lifted. Oh, ok, there's the scenery!
Another 1000m up in the now-bright sunshine, looking down on the cloud-filled canyons, it was great. The temperature out of the chilly fog had risen to 21C, just enough to be warm but not hot, and we followed the track up and up and up to the col, even walking over some lingering patches of snow. I took a lot of wildflower pictures, there isn't a lot of grazing at the real high altitudes.
Finally (and yeah finally) around 3pm we crested the col. It felt remote and austere and strange being up that high, the track stayed pretty well up hight until heading back down into the mist.
And then the downhill, on and on into the gray, more flower pictures telling myself "the lighting will be so even!", and then the ski area and treeline and the concrete ski village and the hotel.
Definitely the toughest day so far, but oddly enough not the hardest day. We're pretty fit and know we can just keep shuffling along and finsh things out if we're not having a great time, which we definitely did today.
Bonus, by the way, is the hotel. A fun little place called the Hôtel Bould de Niege (the
Snowball Hotel) with a great bar and comfy rooms. We finished off the day with cantaloupe and
ham entrée, an omelette for the main, and a fruit crumble iwth vanilla ice cream for dessert.
And some beer and cider :-)