- Distance: 14.7km (9.1 miles)
- Ascent/Descent: 1185m up, 641m down (3887' up, 2103' down)
- Time: 7 hr 30 min
- Weather: Morning 15C to 28C and sunny (59 - 82F), afternoon 28C to 34C (82 - 93F)
OK, no sugarcoating. I'm tired, Chris is tired, and we are tired of trudging through cow pastures in the heat, marching straight up and straight down hills and then back up again.
The breakfast was rather exceptional and generous, though the vibe was a bit off. Throughout
dinner last night the owner watched the coverage of the wildfires on TV, and we both know enough
French to understand his complaining about how it's a disaster, and if France just kept all its
firefighting aircraft at home, and stopped funding Ukraine, that France would be stronger.
There was also some nattering about Jesus saying "charity begins at home", then more whining
about why France is spending so much money on third world countries and not at home. France
first, and you can bet he's going to vote for Le Pen next election.
We stopped at the large Carrefour market to pick up a pair of hiking shorts--we've both lost a a fair bit of weight, but French sizes are a bit confounding to us, what does 46 mean? Or 52?, so we ordered a pair of inexpensive hiking shorts that Decathalon shipped to the shop.
Up and away, and past a curious art installation protesting recent conversions of native forest to monoculture of Douglas fir for timber harvesting. Maybe it's a reaction to the local conserative agriculturalists around? We've past a fair number of propoganda signs put up by the local pastoral association blathering on about how beneficial and traditional their activities are, with a bit of femme-turfing around "what about the women back in the olden days". My take on all of that: it's more than a bit of bullshit.
Many of the pastoral opportunities were opened up in the last 80 years when petrol-powered vehicles allowed these graziers to haul their livestock up above treeline, and graze on unprotected state-owned land, and then haul them back down. Only occasionally were areas set aside as preserves. The cow and sheep owners got most of the land, helped by road building projects in the 1930s and later with hydro schemes in the late 1940s and 1950s. It's only "traditional" because after two generations, no one can remember anything else.
So, after really looking at the art, yeah, I was in a bit of a irritable mood, and even more because it's time once again to head through the forest and up and up and up, climbing some 700m up to a col. There were good views behind us, but immediately around the track wasn't much, just typical forests, an occasional pasture, and a village or two. We encountered yet more "asshole farmer" boundaries, where we're hiking right up on the boundry between some overgrazed weedy pasture land just over a barbed wire fence. Keep your arms close to you because you'll be gashed and bloody if you move them 5cm further to the right.
After a stop at a picnic table Chris spotted next to some stone two-room dwelling, and a chat with a hiker coming down "you need to stop, uphill to the col it's all hot and in the sun", we went sigh. This is going to be another hot long day. Sigh, not again, for the fourteenth time, or is it the seventeenth?
We've both had deteriorating moods for a few days now. There have been some really sublime moments, but
this trail is essentially a lot of tedious hot walks to endure and not to enjoy. Mix in quite
a bit of substandard
lodging (not last night,
but definitely at Lac D'Ordean), and we're both feeling a bit down. Physically I'm doing well,
no complaints, oddly no blisters, my right knee is a bit stiff but not painful though numb on
the outside (perhaps I'm not sensing the pain because of that). I mention that this isn't like
the GR20, this is just energetically yet mostly bland, and my fun meter has sunk to maybe 25 or
30%.
Even in Corsica on the GR20 that fun meter hovered between 45% and 70%. This is just, ugh, day
after day with not much payoff, things I'd describe as "transition days" like riding my
motorbike from Omaha to Denver, but over and over and over. Hm, I'm thinking, maybe we c*an
not do something as demanding?
It's kind of hard to say "Yeah, I can do this, but it's not really worth it" but that's where we both are.
Down from the col to the next stop, and it's another hour of quad-busting through degraded shadeless pasture filled with cowshit and flies. Views south to the crest, rather nice, but we can't look much, this hot track is filled with rocks and I'm thinking "it's getting really mentally tiring figuring out where to put each foot for every step for six or ten hours." Once we land in Loudenville, there's a picnic table and it's 12:30; of course it's time for lunch.
We chat. Do we want to do two hours in the waters in Bainéa, just 500m away? No, too hot. Do we want to take the chairlift up to Germ? No, the chairlift is running, but goes a lot farther up. Do we want to do stay tomorrow night in Refuge Espingo? Uh, 1650m up, 1050m down, 17.3km. That sounds pretty awful, especially as tomorrow will be 5C warmer than today.
So do we get off the trail for a while? We both say yes.
Chris texts the taxi driver ferrying our luggage to Bagnéres de Luchon, can he take both of us?
Sure, he says, and he'll text back a time for us to be ready when we reach the inn in Germ. Can
we pick up a rental car in Luchon, our next stop? Not really, but SNCF has a €10 train ticket from
Luchon to Toulouse, and we can rent a car at the gare for a week or two, give our bodies time to
recuperate.
OK, that's set in motion. We get cool drinks at the Carrefour Montagne in Loudenville and then
walk up the 2km (and 400m) to our rest spot in Germ. Cool drinks are welcome, as is the cover
of the filbert shrubs, though they do make it windless any shade is welcome in the 33C temps.
I look at the circles of sunlight through the filberts and think "they're round, not like during
an eclipse" and realize there's an eclipse on 12 August in northern Spain, hmmmmm.
Anyways, we're both kinda done. Chris is hurting a bit more than me, but I'm thinking this isn't much fun. It's been about a month of "fuck you" on this trail--it's not that tough, it's just it's demanding and long, and there just isn't much of interest many of the days.
We'll enjoy our evening, get the taxi to Luchon tomorrow, do some replanning this evening (our current thoughts are a two week car rental for €399 from Alamo in Toulouse) and keep most of our current hotel and refuge reservations--we'll be swapping these long walks with driving from hotel to refuge to hotel. It gives us more of a chance to see things nearby--yeah, a 5km detour to see a cave or an old church is now doable--yet still keeps the "stick to the GR10", which is still a backbone for our Pyrenees trip.