Today the mountains bled.
We caught a hitch from Bielsa back to trail minutes after we started trying. We were late getting started because we had a bunch of logistics to handle. The hard part about always traveling and not having a home base is you always have to have a plan for what comes next. You don’t finish a trip or an adventure and go back home. You have to have a plan for what’s next, always. And if you book travel last minute, you pay a hefty penalty. So you have to know what you will want to do, where you will want to be, and how you will get there, sometime before your current adventure ends, the earlier the better. That’s what we spent the morning doing: figuring out where we will go after the HRP, how we’ll get there, and how long we’ll stay. It’s hard to do all that from a phone. We much prefer to do it from laptops, but we don’t have those, and when we did, we had no clue when we’d finish the HRP. Now, nearly three weeks in, we feel like we can make a semi-educated guess about when we’ll finish. So we spent several hours in our hotel room this morning booking that from our phones.
The couple that picked us up were visiting Bielsa from Barcelona. They didn’t watch the World Cup finals, but they knew Spain won. So not everyone in Europe is into football, in case you were wondering. We told them what we were doing. They sort of got it, I think.
Our hiking day started on a glorious dirt road. It made us feel like competent hikers again, being able to go faster than 1mph. The grade was much more gradual, like the PCT, so we could just walk and walk. Our guidebook warned us to get an early start to avoid doing this climb in the heat. There was actually quite a bit of shade on the way up, so I don’t know what that guy was talking about. It was hot but very manageable with the breeze and shade. There were many worse sections with no such warning. Near the top, we tried to find a tree with shade so we could take a lunch break. Of course when we need it, shade is impossible to come by. We found some, but I ate lunch partly in the sun and trying to prevent myself from sliding down hill.
We’re behind everyone we’ve met, we think, after taking a day off yesterday. However, we plan on scaling up our daily hiking hours going forward, so we’ll probably catch some of them again. We’ve given ourselves a deadline for the end now, so we’ll also try to hit that. It doesn’t do us much good to finish before that deadline either.
We talked amongst ourselves about our nomadic lifestyle of constant travel and adventure. At some point we considered staying in Europe through next summer, particularly if the job search didn’t turn up anything by then. However, we’ve realized we’d rather be back home by then. I think I’ll take a summer off from long distance backpacking. I’d love to do some shorter trips, but I’d also love to have a place to go back to and unpack. And we miss our friends back home.
It’s been 7 years since I’ve been here before. I came and met a friend who was finishing up her through hike of the HRP. I’m pretty sure we did the Gavernie to Salardu section together, but I don’t remember all the details. She was the badass one handling all the logistics, and I just joined for 10 days. Thinking about how difficult it is to meet someone on trail, I have even more respect for whatever she did to make our dates work out. In any case, I get fleeting glimpses from the past as I stare out into the landscape. Most of it, I don’t recognize and it’s as if I’m seeing it for the first time. There are some things however, that resurface in my mind, usually a little bit after I’ve passed it. This happened today with a dam we passed: I remember seeing it. I also remember the hut above Gavernie from a few days ago with the spectacular sunset. When I was there in 2019, it rained. That’s the other thing that’s most striking to me: in my mind, it was much greener and wetter here 7 years ago at about this time. This time however, the HRP has been very hot, there’s been basically no rain, and much of the grass I remember being green is now brown. So what will it look like in another 7 years?
Near the end of our hike today, we came across these striking, obsidian colored peaks. The peaks had these crevasses running down them, and the color of the soil within the cracks was rust colored. It was as if the mountains had been cut and we could see their insides, red just like ours.