I slept in again. It’s funny how sleeping in is 6:30. When you live your life largely by the hours of the sun, sleeping past sunrise feels like sleeping in. However, going to sleep before sunset is almost guaranteed out here.
We woke up and were surprised to see several people ahead of us on the trail as we were packing up. Where did these people come from?! No one came by at all yesterday, and we were there since 17:00. I guess it was Saturday but I thought this route might be more obscure. It turns out, it’s not uncommon for other routes to use this same start.
We started our day and it was a steep start. Zoë was frustrated that we were going straight up a mountain, rather than following a trail. Once we made it to rocks, the climb got more fun. It was several thousand feet, this first climb and it gave us a fantastic view of the Cirque de Troumouse that we first saw yesterday. I had a newfound appreciation for it as we rose above it: it was massive. We made it to the top and got to walk along a nice, wide ridge above the cirque. We then followed the route, past some sheep to our first major decision for the day. We had 3 options, we chose what we thought might be the most interesting one. It turns out, that interesting option involved a super steep descent that I thought would probably rip up a ton of our gear. Since we had climbed up a ways to investigate this option, we pivoted from there to the third option: walking a ridge for a long ways to another pass.
This ridge was a little too spicy, in hindsight. It wasn’t fun for Zoë, and she ended up ripping her shorts on a rock. She’s currently sewing the rip closed as I write this post. Anyway, no fun for Zoë also means no fun for me. We continued and eventually made it, but I made a mental note to try and avoid things like that in our future route selection. Also, I rolled an ankle at some point on a very banal portion of the ridge, so I’ll go back to wearing my brace for a while.
Once we finished the traverse we were back on the “normal” high route. We descended a pass and had to traverse a long ways back the way we had just come. If we could have made that first option work, we would have saved a lot of distance because it would have dumped us out much further ahead of where we were now. We tried not to think about that too much as we climbed up past the point where the two trails met. We opted to keep pushing to our lake of the day for a late lunch.
There was some sign near one portion of the lake, but we couldn’t read it and we weren’t going to divert to go read it. I could guess what it said but ignorance is better. I got into the lake that no one else was swimming in. Weird, right? We had lunch in a weird location. Sometimes the sun would be out, the wind would stop, and it would feel really hot. But then these small bugs would come out of nowhere and swarm us. Then the wind would pick up and take the bugs away, a cloud would come in, and it’d become freezing. It was hard to be comfortable, but I was still glad we had a lake.
When we left, we passed a sign that said had restrictions, including swimming. Good thing I hadn’t seen that sign earlier. Leaving the lake we had our final climb. As we descended, we considered our options. We were close enough to make it to our next town, Parzan, that day, if we wanted. On the other hand, we’d probably arrive at 18:00, which wouldn’t leave much time for anything and would mean we’d just pay to sleep. However, our friend Simon said he was staying at the campground in nearby Bielsa, so we could go hang out with him if we decided to stay. The World Cup final of Spain vs Argentina would be on Sunday, and since we’d be in Spain, we figured we’d take a day off hiking and watch the final tomorrow night in Spain. We decided we’d go on tonight and see how the campground was.
We hitched to town with a guy who works at NATO, but lived on Coronado for 3 years. We stopped in at a supermarket to get soap for our showers since that’s basically impossible to come by at campgrounds here in France or Spain. We then walked the 15 minutes to the campground. After we checked in, we found our site which was shared with a motorhome. The campground was packed with muggles (non hikers). They all had things like folding tables, chairs, and probably lots of food with water already in it. There was a swimming pool and it was packed in the heat of the afternoon.
We collapsed in our site, leaned against a fence and tried to cool off. We couldn’t really swim until we showered and did laundry. And we couldn’t do those things until we ate dinner. While we were eating we found out Simon actually wasn’t here, but in some other nearby town. I re-read the messages and still can’t really figure out why he isn’t here but I thought he was. I’m not sure we’d be here otherwise, but at least we got a shower and we were finally able to wash our clothes. Tomorrow, I’m not sure what we’ll do, but at least we’ll start the day clean.