HRP Day 1 - Hendaye to Bera

I had planned to start the hike 4 days ago but delayed things because the forecast was very wet. However, over the last 4 days the new forecast has got gradually worse and it is now almost as bad as when I delayed things. Today should be wet from time to time and tomorrow looks horrible, with heavy rain from dawn till dusk. As a result, I've changed my destination tonight to Bera, in Spain, where I've been able to book a hotel, the Hostal Zalain. 

Today is a Sunday and that has made the planning a bit tight. The earliest train gets me to the Hendaye just before 11.00 and the reception in the hotel closes early, so I can't mess around at the start. Straight out of the station and heading east, looking for the GR10's red and white stripes. I soon picked them out and started following them. There are a few marginal (almost spurious) differences between the GR10 and the HRP at the start; I just followed the GR10 to save navigation time.

Getting out of Hendaye and into the countryside went smoothly and I was soon hiking in rolling hills and heading towards la Rhune, a well known Basque hill. There were lots of short, sharp ups and downs before I took a tunnel under the motorway and found myself on a more sustained climb. The gray weather and scenery were almost Scottish, but the rain held off and I soon arrived at the Col d'Ibardin on the border. At this point, I left the HRP and headed down to Bera on a Spanish hiking trail. 

The Town Hall (on the right) in Bera

In Bera, I passed the town hall and saw a moving memorial to the Spanish civil war (the families of Francists were expelled from the village and the memorial denoted this by metal footprints in the village square). I picked out the start of tomorrow's hike before heading to the hotel, which was actually a couple of kilometers out of town. English was my language of communication in the hotel - the patronne huffily didn't speak any English, but her staff were eager to help. My room was modest, but it had everything I needed and only cost 25 euros.

Later on I went out for a meal at a bar called Zubiondo where French worked better for communication. There was a nice family atmosphere and I watched pelote basque on the TV as I ate. 

HRP - The Introduction

The Haute Route Pyrénéenne (or HRP) is a long distance hike. It traditionally starts in Hendaye on the Atlantic coast and pretty much follows the crest of the Pyrénées (on the France-Spain border) all the way to the Med (though, of course, it can be done in the opposite direction). The current guidebook describes it as 44 days of hiking, and these are generally pretty long days; with rest days and some bad weather people generally take somewhere between 50 and 60 days to do it.

The HRP is rather more intense than most long distance hikes (e.g. the GR5 or GR10). First, it stays high in the mountains on pretty rough terrain; at times, it is more like a mountaineering route. Huts are further apart in the Pyrénées than the Alps and you're seldom near a village, so you often have a choice between really long days to get to accommodation or camping. Navigation is also an issue; there are no red and white stripes to mark the HRP and sometimes there really isn't a discernable path. 

I live locally and I don't plan to do it all in one go. Instead I'll do it in sections over the next 2 or 3 years. My approach is to carry very light bivouac gear but to use huts when it makes sense (maybe 70% of the nights). I had planned to start the hike a couple of years ago but Covid 19 (and the associated health measures) put paid to that. But I'll be heading to the start of the hike by train tomorrow morning. I intend to do the first of the HRP's 5 sections, Hendaye to Lescun, which should be 9 days of hiking, before the summer 'busy' season.

Cycling in the Time of Coronavirus

It was only ten days or so ago when France started entering lock-down, but it feels like a lifetime ago. It suddenly became clear to me that just leaving my house would be severely restricted or even completely forbidden. I had lots of questions, including 'what would I do for exercise?'. 

I hate stationary cycling (compared with the real thing it's just so boring), but that seemed the most obvious choice. So I went online and ordered a 'home trainer' so I could continue to ride my bike at home and maintain some level of fitness and sanity. It duly arrived just as France entered full confinement. Now I choose a different part of the garden each day (gotta reduce boredom) and set up my old road bike on the home trainer and cycle for 40 minutes or so. 

It's nothing like as pleasant as real cycling, of course, but it helps maintain fitness and fills my days. The confinement is a bit strange but it's not unpleasant for my wife and me. But spare a thought for families with small children stuck in small apartments without a garden. Or for the medical professionals that are likely to be overwhelmed by critical cases in the weeks to come. And all of this is likely to last at least a few months.

La Cirque de Gavarnie and la Breche de Roland

La Grande Cascade

I finally got round to visiting two places today on a hike. The first was the Cirque de Gavarnie, a huge wall of cliffs that looms above the village. The hike to the cirque is very popular with all sorts of tourists but I left them behind at the cirque. I climbed up the wall via the Echelle des Sarradets, a simple but sensational route with great views over to the Grande Cascade - said to be the highest free-standing waterfall in Europe. After that, some more gentle hiking took me up to my bivouac for the night and a nasty surprise - I had forgotten my thermarest and a chilly night awaited me!

Climbing up the French side of the Breche

Next morning I climbed up to the Breche de Roland. The frontier between France and Spain is a super sharp ridge, almost like a shark's fin, and the Breche is like a gap in the fin. It's a bit hard to explain it but it's pretty sensational when you are there. My hike took me through the Breche then some hiking on the Spanish side took me up the Taillon, a 3114 meter mountain. Then I turned round and started the long descent back to Gavarnie by a different route.

Spanish side of the Breche

I was very pleased to visit both places, but it was a little bittersweet. Just 30 years the climb up to the Breche was all on a glacier; it must have felt much more like the high mountains. Today, the glacier is almost gone and you do the climbing up a dusty moraine (like a heap of gravel). For about 20 meters you walk over the tiny remnant of the glacier; it is pink with algae - the darker color helps the melting and the melting helps the algae. It's the same story throughout the Pyrénées - they may be glacier free in 30 years. Climate change is a concern of mine (I have started a website on the topic); while glacier loss in the Pyrénées is a relatively minor consequence it's still sad. 



Some pics.

Cathay Paciic Moment on the Col du Pourtalet

Spot the error?

We all make mistakes, but - as Cathay Pacific has shown - sometimes a whole team needs to screw up to deliver an exceptional error. 

Today I cycled the Col du Pourtalet - a long lovely climb up the Ossau valley to the Spanish border. As usual on the popular cycling climbs, there were signposts every kilometer to tell you the distance to go, your current altitude, the gradient of the next kilometer and the altitude at the top of the col. Believe me, when you're struggling on a climb you study all this information very carefully.

View of the Pic du Midi d' Ossau from the top of the col

Getting to the last kilometer, you're able to perform a consistency check on these 4 bits of information and - well - today they didn't pass the test. It left me a little curious as to the whole process of making these signs and how many people didn't notice or didn't care about the obvious error.

But it didn't spoil my day out...

Le Palas

Le Palas (or Pic Palas)  is a highish (almost 3000 meters), rocky peak near the Refuge d'Arrémoulit. It can be climbed in a very long day, but I took the lazy approach and elected for an overnight bivouac near the hut. The route up to the hut starts with a long hot slog up a sunny valley to a col; the path then turns right and works its way to the Passage d'Orteig, an easy but very exposed traverse protected by a cable. You don't strictly need to cross the passage to reach the hut (it can be bypassed with an extra 45 minutes or so of hiking) and various signs dissuaded the inexperienced from taking it. But - of course - it was fun!

The refuge is a small, rather primitive one and lots of people were bivvying around it so I moved some distance away and found a nice spot at a small lake. The next morning I set off early and worked my way through boulders to the start of the (somewhat) technical climbing. A sharp exposed ridge on wonderful rock lead to the summit, with great views in all directions. The descent back to the car in the heat of the day seemed very long, but - a benefit of climbing with bivvy gear - I was able to stop at midday and cook myself lunch!

Some pics

Le Tour du Pic du Midi d'Ossau

The Pic du Midi d'Ossau is probably the most famous mountain in this part of the Pyrénées. I climbed it last year but there's an interesting long hike around it I've been meaning to do. There are a number of tempting extensions to this tour but the hike then gets a bit long for a day. But, as I've got some new bivy gear I wanted to try out, an overnight hike made a lot of sense.

The weather around Pau has been cool and overcast but with an inversion, so it looked likely the mountains would be above the clouds. And so it proved; after hiking up through the forest in the clouds I popped out to clear skies. Some gentle hiking took me to my bivouac for the night, at around 2200 meters, just below the Col de Suzon. During the night there was lightning on the plains to the north and it made for interesting viewing.

There was a lot of hiking the next day, much of it spectacular with the Pic du Midi always in view. The best scenery was out the west of the peak around the Lac Bersau and the Refuge d'Ayous. I finished the day with a climb up the Pic d'Ayous and then a long descent back to the car.

Some pics.