Wow, what a night. That was, by far, our worst night’s sleep on trail this trip. It’s like I had a newborn that was my tent and the crying was the wind. When we pitched the tent for the night after our exhausting day, the wind wasn’t too bad. We were on an extremely hard surface, so rather than hammer the stakes into the ground, I laid rocks on top of the stakes to hold them in place. Now what you need to know is that we have what is known as a non-free standing tent. This means the tent doesn’t have one of those spine-like structures that you assemble by connecting the bungee-cord tent pole segments. Our tent uses trekking poles for loft, and then relies on tension with the stakes in the ground to hold it up. If you remove a stake, part of the tent collapses. If you’re wondering why we have a tent like this, it’s because they’re typically lighter, especially if you’re carrying trekking poles anyway.
Before last night, I might have said our tent is particularly bad in the wind, in that it is prone to flapping. But that’s not true! All tents are shit in the wind. Ok so here’s what happened. Our tent is essentially a rectangle with a stake on each corner. Remove a stake, a quadrant collapses. Staking tents by placing rocks on them isn’t entirely uncommon, and in fact is necessary when pitching on an entirely rock surface, since you can’t stake into it. It generally works fine. It didn’t work well last night on the side of the tent that was receiving massive gusts of wind. The wind would slam into a wall of the tent, which acted like a sail against the nearest stake, and slowly nudged it out from beneath increasing amounts of rocks.
Inside the tent, I fell asleep pretty quickly. I’d say I slept for 2 hours before the first tent collapse happened. That was all the sleep I would get. I got out of the tent, found the dislodged stake, and put it back more carefully, thinking that would be the end of it. The wind never let up. Inside the tent, despite wearing earplugs, the flapping of the wind against the tent was tremendous. It would cave the tent in so much, I was constantly being hit on the head by the tent. In addition, gusts of wind would come into the tent, beneath the outer edge, and tug on my sleeping bag. Finally, the far corner of the tent was receiving a similar beating and would cause the tent to lift up off the ground slightly, despite the weight of my possessions and feet holding it down.
After re-staking the tent, I’d get back in the tent and attempt to fall back asleep. I couldn’t because of the abuse the wind was giving to the tent and in turn my tent was giving to me. Eventually a stake would come loose, I’d crawl out again, fix it and any others that became looser with increasingly bigger piles of rocks on each stake, and try to fall back asleep again. I saw several other people with free standing tents (the ones with the bungee cord segmented spines) also up fixing things with their tents during some of my ventures. Once I gave up and let Zoë handle it. I was just too broken to do it again, hence the newborn analogy. I was so relieved when my alarm went off. I was exhausted, but at least we could leave.
We had our hardest thing up first. Actually our entire day was hard but I thought that once we got the first pass out of the way, things would get easier. They did not. We got a little off track on our way up and thankfully backtracked, rather than trying to meet our route further on. Since we were the first ones up the pass that morning, we had the pleasure of displacing the hissing deer, known as isards. When we made it up, we realized the real challenge was getting down the other side. And hasn’t that been the theme of this trip for us: fast up, forever down.
We navigated snow and rocks with great care. Upon getting lower, I saw our initial descent was actually a poor choice and we didn’t need to kick all the steps in the snow with trail runners that I did. Nor did we need to expose ourselves to such danger climbing down the rocks. If only we had seen the other option from above.
After the initial part of the descent, the rest of it went fairly well. Then we climbed up another pass, scared a ton of isards, saw a bunch of people, and made relatively quick work of the ascent. The descent down the other side took us forever. It was so challenging and grueling. Even when we finally got down to a river, the path next to the river was very unforgiving. It had numerous rocks at odd angles, trail that was too narrow, sometimes the trail would disappear without a cairn in sight, and other times there would be several cairns on a very obvious section of trail.
I did manage to find a nice deep pool in the river and I went for a swim. The water was much too cold but I dunked again, just to feel the relief. I was exhausted when I started the day and the cold water did little to reinvigorate me, but did make my limbs numb.
We decided to have lunch further on, when the trail was supposed to descend through a forest. We figured that might mean shade. We found some awkward shade and I collapsed. I managed to eat before I dozed for 30 minutes. When I woke up, the shade had shifted and I was way too hot again. I had to stumble down the trail until I found a small stream I could dunk my shirt and hat into to help cool me off. I don’t think I’ve felt comfortable, temperature-wise, since May.
Soon after lunch, we made it down the shitty trail (seriously, do the Spaniards know how much better hiking could be?) to a road. There was supposed to be a bus somewhere, sometime, for a seemingly high amount of money. We tried hitching and in true Spanish fashion, had a ride within a few minutes. The women who picked us up are ski instructors here, who were out for a hike today.
In the town of Benasque, all we needed to do was buy food for 3 days and get some more stove fuel. Our stove fuel had lasted us nearly 3 weeks. We didn’t attempt to do showers, laundry, or charging since that’s not the easiest thing to do here and we had just done it 3 days ago.
We got our camp fuel once the siesta ended at 16:30 and the stores reopened. We tried hitching back up to trail, which seemed like a long shot but nevertheless, worked like a charm. The first guy took us 5 minutes up the road, and the next guys took us the rest of the 10km.
We had the easiest part of our day after getting dropped off. We wandered down a finally-good trail for 30 minutes to a plateau with a few cows and some water. Man I hope the wind doesn’t come tonight.