- Distance: 17.8km
- Ascent/Descent: 346m up, 1619m down
- Time: 7 hr 47 min
Down and down. Toes are a bit cramped. Lots of scenery.
Left the Refuge de Bayssellance straight after breakfast, when it's still cool and the mountains are shading the track. Cool is a bit relative; even up here at 2700m it's still 21C at 7:30am. It made the long steep downhill more pleasant. Sometimes the track zig-zagged, sometimes it went along balcony trails, it was always super-scenic but we were more concerned about where we were putting our feet, truth be told, though we did look up frequently.
Eventually the track came to a flat lake, we had lunch.
After that, it went up (ugggh, don't make me use those muscles) to a shelf, and contoured along for many km, ducking in and out of a pair of valleys, past mellow cows and wary marmots. So many marmots...
Then it was just down and down to Gavarnie. We're feeling OK, not great, that was a lot of work. Checked into our place at a chambres de hôtels, took a shower, wrote this post. Feeling relaxed, and just about out of oomph, but not really out of energy.
