Self Powered

A Day with Donald and Graham, or: Pie, Hills and Industry

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:05:00 +0000

This week, I took a wander in the uplands for a very manageable though boggy round in the smaller, more rounded hills of Lanarkshire and the borders. The walk takes in 4 Donalds and 1 Graham, if that's your thing.

The thaw of the last few days didn't help conditions underfoot, and by lunchtime my supposedly waterproof mids were soaked through, again. Icy cold on the top of Culter Fell, and with cloud billowing in and out, then slushy and boggy with a fierce westery for the rest. Then sun made an appearance now and again, as promised.

I've never walked here before, and it reminded me alot of the Brecon Beacons. Hudderstone Hill is where it got good, a fine platform to view Tinto to the northwest. The best part was the end, a grand track on the crest out to the burbling waters of Cow Gill. One of lifes great pleasures is coming down off a windswept hill, into the quiet of a valley, and hearing sounds that have been blocked out all day by the wind - heightened senses.

Despite the sad news surrounding Buzzard poisoning in the area, something is still hunting in these glens - I saw and heard 2 or 3 birds today, though wasn't able to identify in time. They looked too small to be buzzards though they may have been youngsters, and I'm no expert.

Its always good to get some exercise and get some wind in my sails, and above all get some height and some perspective and some time to do simple things like put one foot in front of the other. But if I'm totally honest I found this walk a little dull, which is sort of interesting after a fashion. This was a walk on managed land, intensively farmed land. Land clear felled of trees. Sheep grazing, grouse moor cultivation, forestry plantations, reservoirs, turbines.

Alot of people will look at this photo and see nothing wrong. Many think windmills look ok, even picturesque in the landscape. In such a managed, farmed place, does their presence even matter? Is it not just more infrastructure in a place which is already shaped by man? To those still to decide, or who think that all those that oppose are right-wing climate change denying nimby's, let me ask: When all the free space in the world has been disappeared, turned into dual carriageways and garage forecourts and branches of supermarkets and electrical discount stores, where will we go to get away from it all? Where will we hike to? Furthermore, when presence of industry is justified everywhere on grounds of climate change, ask cui bono - who benefits from industrialised land - Landowners, energy companies and politicians? Or, utility bill and tax payers, wildlife and the planet?

I know, its getting old isn't it.

To those that follow these things, and who have decided that turbines are not working, let me ask: Can we envisage a scenario where a map of wild land could be used to justify further development and industrialisation on land not designated as 'wild', in order to protect what has been designated?

All land in Europe is managed one way or another, more or less. Last week's walk was on managed land too, but the right kind of managed. Why? Because its by us but not for us. The stuff that's left usually has to have a national park or scientific designation or a physical fence put round it, to stop people building golf courses and holiday homes on it. Wild land has to be managed by culling pests or removing intrusive species because the landscape scale required by a healthy ecosystem isn't present - the ecosystem is isolated, locked in its national park boundary, and can't self-regulate - it needs our help. But, as soon as we put a fence around something, the stuff that borders it is more at risk: From pollution, exhaustive exploitation of resources, overcrowding and the bulldozers. A veritable double edged sword.

Furthermore, if we can envisage such a use of this map...what should the project be: To save what little is left, or to start to reclaim what has been destroyed? Can we afford to prioritise one over another?

For every step that's made, the lines are drawn further on all sides, until we're poles apart. Farmland looks and feels different to the city, where most of us live, most of the time, even though its another type of industrial landscape. Its easier to think about indoors and outdoors, not different types of outdoors, just simple opposites. Maybe that sounds patronising, but I taught kids in London that had never been out of the city, ever, and a city farm or the park was as good as it got. That's why I think the 'visual intrusion' argument is a losing one, although I do have some sympathy with it. Beauty is in the eye of beholder goes the phrase, which makes it fairly unreliable as a gauge for something so important as habitat conservation.

But enough already, I'm boring myself. I don't mean to lecture, I don't know the answers - these are just things I think about when I'm bog hopping. By all means throw your hat in the ring in the comments box below.

Pie? I had a pie and some soup for lunch, it was super (souper?). Well, the pie worked, the soup didn't stay as hot as tea does. Really, this was just an excuse to get out whilst I plan my first wild camp of 2012. Weather permitting, that's Arrochar in 2 weeks - somewhere small but tall I can have a good mooch around in. What I'm really craving is waking up early, putting coffee on, and watching the sun rise. Bit worried about the footwear though.

The walk? Its still a good one, if you don't mind some of the views: http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/glasgow/culter-fell.shtml

Aberlady Bay

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:28:00 +0000

A local one for us, on an absurdly sunny Monday in February. Beach, sand dunes, bird life, calm seas and no wind, a quiet and chilly return on a little chunk of the John Muir Way and Saltcoats Castle via a blazing sunset and a nigh on full moon. But then again, just the sound of this place was a complete tonic - the chattering, quipping, parping wildlife - curlews and crows, shags and shanks, oyster catchers and others we don't know yet, lapping waves and the crunch of frozen sand underfoot (that's a new one). A sensory land of wonder, full of life even in winter. In a few months we'll return for the start of the migration season, and next time remember both the bird book and the mini telescope. Thankfully, a good amount of information is provided on site by the reserve and east lothian council/SNH about sea buckthorn (used in the 70's to control erosion, now a problem on its own), and roe deer management (albeit written in a very anthropocentric manner). Maram grasses are being encouraged in order to protect the dunes.

The walk: http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/lothian/aberlady-gullane.shtml
The nature reserve, founded in 1952, is the oldest in the UK: http://www.aberlady.org/Nature%20reserve.html
More info including midget submarines: http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/aberlady/aberladybay/index.html

Adventures in Aviemore

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:36:00 +0000

Getting here before was a real pavlova, now its just 2.5hrs up the road. That means a lie in and still there for a stroll in the woods.

For the good ladies birthday, a treat was requested in the form of a spa hotel and skiing,
and the Hilton Coylumbridge was forthcoming with a 3 nights for 2 offer, good food, pool, sauna and massage facilities. It was surprisingly fine, even for someone who'd rather be outdoors freezing his apex off than inside in an air conditioned nightmare, and great value. Excuses made, then.

So, skiing. Sometimes I think this blog is a literal catalogue of errors and nothing else. Charlie don't surf, and south London oiks certainly don't ski. I've always had a bit of an issue with skiing, and definitely with its alpine form - that was for the rich kids at school, a well groomed and heeled party to which I was not invited. If the pose in the funicular on the way up Cairn Gorm was self conscious, what must Chamonix be like? Despite that, the morning tuition was more fun than I've ever had with that many clothes on, and the afternoon brought to mind the phrase 'old dog, new tricks'. Hurtling down the Ciste fairway out of control at ?muchtoofast? m.p.h. didn't help, and neither did coming off the T bar and being dragged along on my face with my fair lady trapped and tangled and our ski's crossed. I ended up with a bruised kidney and she with a twisted ankle. Both of us are still black and blue in several other less serious places. Yea bro', like, todally rad. Otherwise, T is a complete natural at this new game and I am a terrified and wobbly geriatric simpleton. I did get it together - briefly, a few times, honest. Next time we will not use the slightly rubbish ski school at the hotel but will be getting telemark instruction from these guys, as recommended by the super friendly and skillful Mountain Spirit. One really shouldn't be older than one's teacher, especially when they seem to care more about their own 360's than their student's safety. Kids huh.

The next day saw us out for a 7 mile bimble, starting at Loch Insh and following the river Feshie upstream for a while, then around to gain Farleiter hill, which is a grand position to admire the sprawl of the birch and pine forest below. Its a nice place to take family, quite accessible and a very different side to the national park than we'd seen before. We loitered for a while noting the rapid changes of light bringing the different layers of trees into and out of relief, sitting on the Feshie bankside at lunch drinking ginger tea. It took us two hours longer than Turnball's book suggests, as we loosened up the previous days wounds. The last hour of light as we met the Badenoch Way was really perfect, pinks and golds and finally an icy turquoise. I really enjoy days like these, not everything has to be mammoth.

Out early for the final day, we attempted, and failed to attain, Bynack More. The wind even at 800ms was absolutely furious and biting cold, and the mountain ahead swept upward in a quite intimidating manner. But then, you should be just a little scared, I think, in the mid winter on an Arctic plateau. It was breathtaking to get up high in that cold clear weather but T's still swollen ankle just wasn't strong enough for the final push, if it was to be done safely. Long limping walk out chewing thoughts for a while until the light in the Ryvoan pass softened things and we discussed a hesitation over the decision to turn back, which cost a little time (but much more valuable warmth). The necessity of committing to a decision and the courage to own it, even when it involves irritation and disappointment. Much better to know our match and come back prepared to meet it next time around. Good judgment, decisiveness and the appropriate level of psych to begin with - these are questions for hillwalkers too, especially in winter. How to expect success, be ready for failure and hold both lightly in the palm of one's hand. That's what we talked about.

Ben Vorlich and Stuc a'Chroin

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:46:00 +0000

I had in mind to go to the nearest munro to Edinburgh, within a week of being here.
Utility hookups intervened, but we got out 2 days later, after a wee bimble on a Sunday following the Water of Leith to the village of Dean, as Fraser suggested we should, which was altogether lovely. They have some fascinating stuff at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art about the Demarco/Beuys Rannoch Moor action, well worth being in the same room with.

Anyway, Monday saw us heading out at the crack for the craic, up into Perthshire on unfamiliar roads to the south side of Loch Earn, following superb instructions from walk highlands, which will give you all the technical detail you need. Ben Vorlich, to be fair, is a straight forward up and down on a well kept path. What makes this more of a handful is the Stuc. Please note '' Hillwalking when there is snow or ice lying requires ice-axe, crampons and the ability to use them. Some featured routes can become technical ice climbs''. It wasn't quite an ice climb, but we were tested twice, once in a snow gully just before topping out onto the Creag Chassain, and once in the gloaming, when our return was blocked by steep snow banks to the northwest, coming down from the saddle between Ben Vorlich and Ben Our. Scottish miles are long ones, especially in winter. Do yourself a favour if you're trying this in the darker months and check your return properly on the way in....like we didn't. Overall, a brilliant start to our walking here - a nice little swipe, a warning not to take anything for granted. Good practice, but not good practise. Here's the map:

Loch Earn was simply lovely in the early morning. A friendly stalker in camo gear towing a 6 wheel buggie straight out of Space 1999 asked us to stay to the path as there was shooting today on Ardvorlich estate. I've yet to meet an ounce of hostility from any locals bar none. Compared to London - what, are you joking?

Up and out on a cold track, freshly laid with a light sprinkling of icing sugar, the barest hint of the arctic conditions on top. I've become morbidly obsessed with weather watching in the last months and the forecast was fair - predicted cold but clear. Take an average of 3 or 4 forecasts is the way. Early morning light, this is what we came for. Across from our slow and steady ascent in the blistering wind, Bhein Domhnuill reminds me of the fells, its lumpy like that. I'm pinching myself - we were in our own bed this morning... all this, so accessible to us now.

Higher up, and meet 3 coming down, all look cold. It is that, T is suffering from a lower BMI - we need to go glove shopping (again). Fierce blasts from the north west, no mercy on Ben Vorlich. The top, however, is still bare fun if one does not linger too long, and some views are available.

The Stuc is to the right, the lowlands on the left. T is still extremely cold, and we are debating whether to swear off for the day. We make for Ben Our, but then brave a little more and after some indecision about the best route to descend (map say left, we say right) head to the bealach between Vorlich and the Stuc a'Croin. I still have my belay jacket on and T shoves icy cold paws under my armpits until the pain stops. I'm ready to call it, this not being a way to approach a scramble in winter. But we meet another nice gent who suggests we watch him on the ascent and this gives T confidence. So, after lunch and plenty hot tea and some distance learning, off we go up.

This is a very steep and rocky ascent and we needed rope and more appropriate skills really - even in summer this would be a fair scramble. We followed our predecessor's footsteps and assumed since we didn't find his body on the way, everything was going to be fine. Impressive views of Vorlich on the way up, enjoying the cold hollow chink of metal on stone. By about 2pm the weather is beginning to close in.

The last section was most testing, T wanted to lead and so did, but got cornered on a slippery section without any islands of safety. She had a moment or two but dug deep and carried on. This pleased me alot, as she was directly above me, wearing crampons, and would have been an awkward catch.

I took over at the last, forging a way up and topping out did feel a little tooth and nail but only for a second, the snow was not giving way here. Test numero uno.

The cairn on top is not the Stuc, that's a little further on. The valley south east, marred by wind power/money stations in the distance. This is what we're here to witness. If you are still silent on this issue and you write about the great outside, now is the time to speak up. Without the wilds we love, we are slaves without a footing - put your heart in your mouth and climb, dear friends, put your heart in your mouth and climb.

Just a touch windy up here. Pretty cornice, quite something, cloud flies in. We keep to the fringes, where rock meets snow.

At the Stuc we take stock. A pat down, a map check, some water and GORP. This is the point to turn back and head for home.

Walking back down the edge, the eddies and swirls of cloud hide and reveal a different view. We feel good, liberated from our lowland selves, seconds after the shot below there's a rainbow and the merest hint of a Brocken Spectre which comes and goes faster than I can remove gloves to take a photo. Rare day indeed.

On the walk out we are blessed with fine fireworks to the south,

and to the west

We miss the steep scree path as its under snow but make our way down on a spurr west of the Creag Chassain. It looks, and was, far steeper in the flesh than in the photo here.

Our hill fitness of the summer is gone, we are feeling it now. By the Fhuadaraich, girl done good.

I realised how much I have missed the sound of running wild water in the last four months - every day and night of last summer it filled my ears, the song of a Pyrenean waking dream. How I relish hearing it now.

The game is not yet up. After a brief stop to remove crampons, water and snack, we cross over the saddle between Ben Vorlich and Ben Our, and our way is barred by steep and heavy drifts of snow. The light is dwindling fast and we make the wrong decision to trust the stalkers path instead of following the line of least resistance back to the lowest part of the saddle and down. With spikes back on, what follows is minutes that seem like hours, inching across hard pack, kicking steps and having to rest dangling from axes, unable to drop down for an age, until we descend via a heather ladder to the path again, far below. Exhausted, sweating, trembling muscles and wavering nerve, quite dangerous and stupid. Mind how you go. If in doubt, (probably) don't.

A long and slippery walk out in the dark. Driving home with a sky full of stars, unused to so little light pollution, dog tired, happy, relieved, lucky.

I think we'll do something a bit less full on next time. Skiing, apparently, that should be amusing. Happy Burns Night.

Hit the North

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:24:00 +0000

December was a time for wrapping things up, and seeing family - I was lucky that way, I hope you were too. I went down south and paid my respects.

January meant boxes, packing, and anxiety. It also meant saying goodbye. I'm not sad to leave London - the backstabbing competitiveness, the lazy one-upmanship, the idle rich and the ignorant poor. But I am sad to leave our friends, who are brave and foolhardy and stoical in the face of the machine, as we mostly all are. They came out to play on a Friday, and for that thankyou all. Come up and see us sometime, its not just idle talk.

Then came the trip, not much to report, except that it went without too much of a hitch, and the border hills of the Cheviots were awash in a winter sunlight relief as we limped into Jedburgh on an empty tank. I like the border and Northumberland alot, and I've never camped in the Cheviots, so I will return - they look like alot of fun in miniature.

Our new home is here in Edinburgh, and we arrived to 2 beautifully cold, clear and crisp days. The same boxes but in different rooms, a fish and chip supper, and a barn of a flat in Leith near the harbour, we don't quite know where to put ourselves. But I love that we can walk into town, or cycle to the other side in 20 minutes - its proportionate - a city for people, not a terra-forming flesh eating monster that spits out the bones of its victims whilst they still mourn the loss of their entrails.

And I still can't quite get over the fact that there's a mini mountain in the city. Tamed it maybe, but in the dawn twilight, some memory of wildness can still be felt - in the blast of arctic wind on the top of Arthur's Seat, the murmur of grasses off the beaten tracks, and the fussing of small birds attending to their partners. Small moments of magic in the park before work. Psychic space.

However, a proper walk is well overdue I think - until Monday, then. I'll leave you with Mr Smith, still sounding as bucolic as he did when I last lived north of the gap, 20 years ago. Slàinte mhath.

Wallace Stegner and the Geography of Hope

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:03:00 +0000

I've been taking quite alot of solace from reading again recently. Its been nice to have a little more time, I've barely picked up a book for several years, turning a page or two at night, never finishing what I start. Running even a small organisation can do that to you, you don't even realise you miss the simple things until suddenly, an hour with a book seems like the most golden, stolen series of moments - such a forgotten treat. And so I came across this letter below, its visionary and inspiring and still relevant 50 years on, and especially to all of us who 'play' outdoors, and in the face of all the big bad news about powerhungry machine-men in Holyrood and Cardiff and Westminster, its good to feed the part of my brain that windy hills and misty valles do - the positive part that loves freedom.
Stegner was a writer and teacher, his students including amongst others Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey. This one letter had a significant impact on policy in the States at the time, and it dovetails completely with a growing conviction that without freedom and space for wild nature, we humans are damned to the hilt. Our common good is at stake, our future bound together - its an obvious yet easily divided fact. Turned against nature, we are more easily turned against each other. Those big greedy boys like to set us up as adversaries, keep us separate, but we must prefer otherwise, and we must do so out loud. So, Brothers and Sisters, let us be shrill no more, let us rejoice...

''Below is Wallace Stegner's Wilderness Letter, written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, and subsequently in his Wilderness Idea, in The Sound of Mountain Water (1969). An introduction to the letter, written by Stegner in 1980, is also available.

Los Altos, California
December 3, 1960
David E. Pesonen
Wildland Research Center
Agricultural Experiment Station
243 Mulford Hall
University of California
Berkeley 4, Calif.
Dear Mr. Pesonen:

I believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission's report. If I may, I should like to urge some arguments for wilderness preservation that involve recreation, as it is ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. Hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all, surely, figure in your report. So will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific yardstick by which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in its man-made imbalance. What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical minded--but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.
I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation, or than the strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what the historians call the "American Dream" have to do with recreation. Nevertheless, since it is only in this recreation survey that the values of wilderness are being compiled, I hope you will permit me to insert this idea between the leaves, as it were, of the recreation report.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea.

We are a wild species, as Darwin pointed out. Nobody ever tamed or domesticated or scientifically bred us. But for at least three millennia we have been engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment, and in the process we have come close to domesticating ourselves. Not many people are likely, any more, to look upon what we call "progress" as an unmixed blessing. Just as surely as it has brought us increased comfort and more material goods, it has brought us spiritual losses, and it threatens now to become the Frankenstein that will destroy us. One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, to remain, insofar as we can, good animals. Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples; for while we were demonstrating ourselves the most efficient and ruthless environment-busters in history, and slashing and burning and cutting our way through a wilderness continent, the wilderness was working on us. It remains in us as surely as Indian names remain on the land. If the abstract dream of human liberty and human dignity became, in America, something more than an abstract dream, mark it down at least partially to the fact that we were in subdued ways subdued by what we conquered.

The Connecticut Yankee, sending likely candidates from King Arthur's unjust kingdom to his Man Factory for rehabilitation, was over-optimistic, as he later admitted. These things cannot be forced, they have to grow. To make such a man, such a democrat, such a believer in human individual dignity, as Mark Twain himself, the frontier was necessary, Hannibal and the Mississippi and Virginia City, and reaching out from those the wilderness; the wilderness as opportunity and idea, the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we forget it in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men. For an American, insofar as he is new and different at all, is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild. The American experience has been the confrontation by old peoples and cultures of a world as new as if it had just risen from the sea. That gave us our hope and our excitement, and the hope and excitement can be passed on to newer Americans, Americans who never saw any phase of the frontier. But only so long as we keep the remainder of our wild as a reserve and a promise--a sort of wilderness bank.

As a novelist, I may perhaps be forgiven for taking literature as a reflection, indirect but profoundly true, of our national consciousness. And our literature, as perhaps you are aware, is sick, embittered, losing its mind, losing its faith. Our novelists are the declared enemies of their society. There has hardly been a serious or important novel in this century that did not repudiate in part or in whole American technological culture for its commercialism, its vulgarity, and the way in which it has dirtied a clean continent and a clean dream. I do not expect that the preservation of our remaining wilderness is going to cure this condition. But the mere example that we can as a nation apply some other criteria than commercial and exploitative considerations would be heartening to many Americans, novelists or otherwise. We need to demonstrate our acceptance of the natural world, including ourselves; we need the spiritual refreshment that being natural can produce. And one of the best places for us to get that is in the wilderness where the fun houses, the bulldozers, and the pavement of our civilization are shut out.

Sherwood Anderson, in a letter to Waldo Frank in the 1920s, said it better than I can. "Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost.... Mystery whispered in the grass, played in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies.... I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formerly at work among our people. The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain.... I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet...."

We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it. But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses as this, all the wild that still remains to us.

It seems to me significant that the distinct downturn in our literature from hope to bitterness took place almost at the precise time when the frontier officially came to an end, in 1890, and when the American way of life had begun to turn strongly urban and industrial. The more urban it has become, and the more frantic with technological change, the sicker and more embittered our literature, and I believe our people, have become. For myself, I grew up on the empty plains of Saskatchewan and Montana and in the mountains of Utah, and I put a very high valuation on what those places gave me. And if I had not been able to periodically to renew myself in the mountains and deserts of western America I would be very nearly bughouse. Even when I can't get to the back country, the thought of the colored deserts of southern Utah, or the reassurance that there are still stretches of prairies where the world can be instantaneously perceived as disk and bowl, and where the little but intensely important human being is exposed to the five directions of the thirty-six winds, is a positive consolation. The idea alone can sustain me. But as the wilderness areas are progressively exploited or "improve", as the jeeps and bulldozers of uranium prospectors scar up the deserts and the roads are cut into the alpine timberlands, and as the remnants of the unspoiled and natural world are progressively eroded, every such loss is a little death in me. In us.

I am not moved by the argument that those wilderness areas which have already been exposed to grazing or mining are already deflowered, and so might as well be "harvested". For mining I cannot say much good except that its operations are generally short-lived. The extractable wealth is taken and the shafts, the tailings, and the ruins left, and in a dry country such as the American West the wounds men make in the earth do not quickly heal. Still, they are only wounds; they aren't absolutely mortal. Better a wounded wilderness than none at all. And as for grazing, if it is strictly controlled so that it does not destroy the ground cover, damage the ecology, or compete with the wildlife it is in itself nothing that need conflict with the wilderness feeling or the validity of the wilderness experience. I have known enough range cattle to recognize them as wild animals; and the people who herd them have, in the wilderness context, the dignity of rareness; they belong on the frontier, moreover, and have a look of rightness. The invasion they make on the virgin country is a sort of invasion that is as old as Neolithic man, and they can, in moderation, even emphasize a man's feeling of belonging to the natural world. Under surveillance, they can belong; under control, they need not deface or mar. I do not believe that in wilderness areas where grazing has never been permitted, it should be permitted; but I do not believe either that an otherwise untouched wilderness should be eliminated from the preservation plan because of limited existing uses such as grazing which are in consonance with the frontier condition and image.

Let me say something on the subject of the kinds of wilderness worth preserving. Most of those areas contemplated are in the national forests and in high mountain country. For all the usual recreational purposes, the alpine and the forest wildernesses are obviously the most important, both as genetic banks and as beauty spots. But for the spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe, other kinds will serve every bit as well. Perhaps, because they are less friendly to life, more abstractly nonhuman, they will serve even better. On our Saskatchewan prairie, the nearest neighbor was four miles away, and at night we saw only two lights on all the dark rounding earth. The earth was full of animals--field mice, ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes. I knew them as my little brothers, as fellow creatures, and I have never been able to look upon animals in any other way since. The sky in that country came clear down to the ground on every side, and it was full of great weathers, and clouds, and winds, and hawks. I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from being much alone. A prairie like that, one big enough to carry the eye clear to the sinking, rounding horizon, can be as lonely and grand and simple in its forms as the sea. It is as good a place as any for the wilderness experience to happen; the vanishing prairie is as worth preserving for the wilderness idea as the alpine forest.

So are great reaches of our western deserts, scarred somewhat by prospectors but otherwise open, beautiful, waiting, close to whatever God you want to see in them. Just as a sample, let me suggest the Robbers' Roost country in Wayne County, Utah, near the Capitol Reef National Monument. In that desert climate the dozer and jeep tracks will not soon melt back into the earth, but the country has a way of making the scars insignificant. It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value. Roads would be a desecration, crowds would ruin it. But those who haven't the strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look. They can look two hundred miles, clear into Colorado: and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as deeply into themselves as anywhere I know. And if they can't even get to the places on the Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of earth is still there.

These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Very sincerely yours,
Wallace Stegner''

Reproduced in full from here.

'HaRPin' On' - Trip Report Bundles Now Available

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:22:00 +0000

The Trip Report is finally finished. Its good to work on a labour of love but its good to finish too. If you donated, please make sure you email me at davepowered AT gmail DOT com if you want the words, pictures and sounds from the coast to coast Haute Route Pyrenees Trip in the summer.

I have already sent the first batch of download links, so keep an eye out for an email, and don't forget to check your 'spam' box if you've not had an email from me before, just in case it ends up there. There are 3 links, all fairly large downloads for which a broadband connection is highly recommended. I'd appreciate if you'd keep these links secure and don't share them - please encourage people to give instead.

Thanks for the support, those who gave it - you know who you are. Many of you are part of the backpacking community, and its this kind of participation that makes a community real - we helped others and not just ourselves. So, the downloads are a way of saying thanks, giving a little back to you in return. I'd be really interested to know what you think about the bundle, whether you enjoy it and also what could be better, so please feedback via twitter or the comments box below.

If you didn't yet donate (where have you been?!) but would like the info, then please go HERE and push the button. A minimum £10 gets you nearly 4 hours of live-as-it-happened mp3 trip report and field recordings, 12 large size screensavers, a 20 minute photo and video slideshow, a gear review of every single item I took tested over 64 consecutive days including some A-B comparisons, and some technical info on the route, including 10 pages of updates to the current English guidebook published by Cicerone. You can of course donate more, which will make me very happy, although you can rest assured I will not otherwise benefit - 100% of the money goes to 2 great causes. Half the money to an educational charity and half to a conservation charity, so you can feel twice as nice about giving ;)

Remember, if I don't have your email and amount/date of donation, I can't send you the links...

Have a fantastic new year everybody.

Haute Route Highlights

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:58:00 +0000

I met up with Andy Howell recently, who knows the Pyrenees well, and he asked - 'So, what were the highlights of the trip?'

It flawed me a little. Partly because we were walking through the city and its been a few months and alot has happened in the meantime. Trying to sum up is pretty impossible, because the whole is more than the sum, and all of it counts, even the parts that weren't so inspiring or comfortable, so its not really divisable. And because what I now remember most clearly is a feeling of wholeness and yes you can laugh and please, be my guest - but that's what doing a long distance walk feels like. Once your metabolism has changed and your in the zone hypnotised by the excercise everything is fluid movement, a blur. Your purpose is to be there, full stop - 360 degrees of sensory equilibrium. You are acutely aware of your mortality but glide through glorious country as if immortal. You are in the landscape, not on it, not quite sure where it ends and you begin. After a few weeks, it all gets a bit jedi knight, but without the self agrandising. Na, that's for later, when you try to describe it. But I did fall in love with the world again on that trip, shed my cynicism and left behind the hard shell. I needed to lose some mental ballast, and ended up traveling light - became an optimist again, returned to myself. It was some kind of alchemy, and I'd recommend it.

That said, I thought about it some more, and here are some of my own highlights. It'll be different for you of course, and there's more out there than what's in here, but it might give you an idea of what to look forward to, if you do the walk. The best camps are here, the other peaks are here:

The beautiful walk out from Burga. I walked long into the evening after summiting the first 1000m+ top of the traverse in high temperatures. As the day began to fizzle away and the shadows grew longer, I felt myself sink into the rhythm of the walk for the first time. I knew I was in for the duration, I had arrived and was completely present in the moment. The beech forest at this stage of the walk is unfathomably lovely.

The mighty Pic D'Orhy is the first 2000m+ summit on the walk, and is quite a challenge. Its a 3 parter, all dry as a bone - the first a long and tiring walk in on a big bold hump strafed by crows, the second a pretty bracing arete with a scrambly drop at the end, and the third a high steep pull to the summit. After that you drop off the peak to its right, then around to bounce down and along the ridge you can see on its left in the photo. Its a good one to size up to and get under your belt early on, and its great fun when you do. Not advised in bad weather, pretty exposed.

The Sierra de Anelara is the high limestone ridge around the Pic d'Anie. Its just heaven here - meadows, butterflies, spikey crags, sinkholes, Isards, alpine nirvana. Watch out, though, all that limestone means its beautiful, but deadly. I will be back here...but with more water next time. Or maybe in winter?

The view from most of the way up Pic d'Anie. I already told you about this one. It took us 14hrs there and back from Lescun, I nearly killed Mark doing it and he nearly killed me after for dragging him along. Access is good and relatively straight forward, and the walk in is long and beautiful, though country lanes and paths in fields and cloud ringed fairie woodlands. After the refuge and the tundra and the shepherds hut you climb high on a stream side and turn onto a broad buttress. Crossing a sudden threshold from granite to limestone you finally see the Pic, pretty arrogant looking. Then the ascent starts. Definitely best done over 2 days.

We took a detour via the GR10 for a few days, just for variety. Then we took a detour from our detour. Rather than join the tourist throng at d'Ayous, we cut the back way via Co d'Aas de Bielle, wandering down through this misty iris covered paradise with an eagle for company. We got a bit entranced and forgot the sore legs for a while. We stopped for lunch at an ancient looking stone table by a mountain hut and later went for a swim in the dam.

The walk between Wallon and Refuge d'llheou was Mark's last full day and a walk of 7 swims. We'd all had a tough stage and I was exhausted and missing my girlfriend, but this redeemed us all. Mark jumped in every lake on the way and had a Roger Deakin moment in the reedbeds. Tim and I took pictures and snoozed. Things lightened up. Then the vista as I turned the corner under Castet Abarca stopped me in my tracks, dead. The clouds flew in and out fast over the Valle de Marcadau and we waited there for ages to watch, speechless, mesmerised. If you need to go to Cauterets (and its far better than Gavarnie), go this way. Its a high pass over to a knee busting valley that time forgot. Magic.

The phenomenal Col de Mulets is at the head of the walk into Odessa. Its a place of zen terrors and some folk get the wobbles here on the scree slopes. The wind is ferocious. I love it - when I laugh in the face of the universe's indifference here it laughs right back with me - we cackle together like lunatics. From here you can take a day to walk down the Val de Ara into Spain. It gets less exposed but still with big skies and serious mountains on all sides. Superb.

At the other end of Odessa, the landscape up to the Breche is just a little bit out there. Its as if someone shook a sheet out and froze it mid shake - immense ripples, giants fingerprints. This is the backside of Monte Perdido, (high above on the left out of frame, with refugio Goriz at its foot) something of a hallowed summit for many Spanish mountaineers. Maybe next time.

There will be those who will regard the Breche de Roland as passe but on a cloudy wet day, with no-one else around, it was great. Here be monsters! This photo is from the day after, when you could see more.

Taillon is also well worth a visit, since you're in the neighbourhood. We had mixed conditions but the ridge ascent is right on the border and just fantastic - if the weather is good you can see for miles over both France and Spain, and right into the cirque de Gavarnie. Don't rush through, stay a while and do a summit or two.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Barroude lakes are something else. The wall is just vast, it blots out most of the sky, and the lakes are still and quiet and seem to bear witness somehow. Marmots nest on tiny peninsulas that jut out into the water, and you can walk through the cotton grass and the shallows and sit on a little mound with them. The route over the pass from Heas is pretty great too, all slabby like Transformers on the top and loose scree as you descend. Beware the walk out from Barroude, to Parzan is a day in anyone's money, the descent to the lakes takes forever, and then there's motorway after that.

The George Blanc. Now there's a thing. Next time.

This is looking back on the Col de George Blanc. Safe to say this whole stretch blew me away. The wind nearly blew Tanya away, literally - she took a small fall in that scree mess in the middle. Its an incredible place, and the start of the really high stuff. Alot of the 'highlights' of my trip are crammed into this small chunk of the walk - its where we were challenged and for that reason I remember it vividly. Its also like nowhere else I've been, save perhaps Teide - a completely surreal and alien landscape.

This is the Col de inferior de Literole, the pass after Portillon and the highest of the trip. The weather swelled in and out like a tide as we descended. It's quite tall. One or two went down without axe or crampons whilst others used rope and belayed as well as the winter kit. We used axe and kahtoolas and were fine - it was good to get a little practice again after last years course. The walk out from here was a taxing and disorientating granite wildnerness, snow and talus tumbling over miles down to the Valle de Remune. Incredible. Awe full.

I'd say the same about Aneto. We didn't summit, though not for want of trying. Weather was serious and we had to turn back or get zapped by the lightning storm on the summit. It was still worth every step, and I will revisit this area. There's enough here to keep you in mischief for a month or two. Utterly spellbinding, this land of rock and ice.

The Mulleres pass is also pretty darn heavy duty. The guidebook is seriously off the mark here, and it would be easy to get caught out, fatally - it wants to send you off the pink coloured col you can see to the left of the walkers, where rock is disintegrating almost by the second. That is not advised. The maps don't give much away either. On the ascent the granite becomes enormous, rounded, glacial, as if a brontosaurus were buried. It sort of feels like as if it might wake up and throw you off too - a little tenuous. And that is precisely its charm. It spooked Tanya a little, I enjoyed it, although she was better on the steep and quite technical scramble down from the Col than I was. This picture is taken as we climbed up the back of Tuc de Mulleres, too far south, to the appropriately named Cap Deth (cough!) Horo de Mullures, attempting to find the Col. I am looking back towards the weather on Aneto, which had continued the day after our attempt.

The lakes on the HRP just along from the Port de Rius. A fantastical watery labyrinth of rocky islands and rainbow trout coloured granite. The weather was finally calming down and the sun did its thing on the tops all evening. The photo of alpenglow at the head of this post was taken here as well. It lasted precisely 45 seconds. The walk out the following morning was another piece of magic, through the inlets and over the mounds, between the mists swirling over the tops and across the lakes. A morphing wonderland. I'd be happy to end my days in this place. There's even a beach.

Looking back the way we'd come, from the summit of Tuc de Marimanha. Its the start of the red and blue country - iron rock, azure crystaline views. No path up here, and we missed the summit the first time ending up on a ridge to the left just too edgy for big bags, so went back down a few metres and tried again. Thomas was fresh from the fleshpots of Barcelona, but held his own through the first few days of hurt.

After the tuc you follow quite a sketchy little ridge and drop down on Talus to this little beauty. The dark patch at the back is where the alien octopus lives of course, it goes all the way down to Nemo's lair. Humbling terrain.

This is the Pic de Certescan. It doesn't look like much in the photo but since you go past, it'd be rude not to climb it wouldn't it? Someone randomly left a whole packet of chocolate biscuits at the col below, which I took as a good sign. 500gms of sticky, artery clogging palm oil and chocolate flavoured goodness - that's the good weight, not the bad kind. I dumped the rucksack with Thomas and went up to a false summit, swung back left and nipped along the ridge to this. All of France under cloud on one side, Spain swimming around in the haze on the other. It feels pretty wild up there, not many visitors, none whilst I was there. On the way back the weather swooped in and battered me with hail and sleet - I fairly ran down. I had a laugh at my own expense, but Thomas was a bit worried and both of us were soaked to the skin.

This is looking over to France, on the way to Pic d'Estats, the highest mountain in Catalonia, and possibly the highest thing I've done solo at a little over 3000ms. It really is quite a special mountain and is clearly held in total reverence by all who climb it, judging by those I talked to on the way up, who all had a lovely twinkle in their eyes from summiting. By this point I was really fit and hooned up this in 2.5hrs as everyone else was coming down. I had the top to myself for half an hour at teatime. I might write this up in its own post at some stage, there's something really lovely about this one, the fact that so many hold it in such high regard. On the top there are tens if not hundreds of memorials to departed friends and relatives. I felt quite honoured to be up there alone with all those memories, paying my respects. You know you're alive on Pic d'Estats.

The lac de Negre, after the Port de Baiau. The ascent of the port is fairly serious, so be en guard. Scree and then some. Keep your party close, but not too close, comprends?! The views at the top are worth the work. It also marks yet another watershed in terrain as well, where it really does become more Mediterranean. Then down to a path alongside this cold dark lake in the shadow of Pic de Sanfonts. I loved this valley, its plainly cut off from much human contact and as a consequence feels suitably untamed and brooding in atmosphere. Thomas was convinced that there was black magic afoot in one of the stone circles, I thought it was just a well cleared tent pitch. Maybe we're both right.

A valley after Llortes. More insects than I've ever heard or seen in my life. Its a takeover.

Don't let me hear you say, life's taking you nowhere. Angel. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes. Don't let anyone tell you its all over in the east. Not true. Lake to lake high above Hospitalet pres d'Andorre. Natures bathtubs keeping us clean and cool after a serious cooking in the sun. Some fantastic walking around the Pic de Rulhe.

This is the end of the Noarre ridge, which in a way is the big surprise or secret of the last stage. Its enormous, a good day long, two if you count the incredible plateau walk that comes after, and the rock formations are out of this world. Seriously windy, it was a job to stay upright at times, but big horizons and superb views in all directions. Bracing stuff.

A blissful walk in under Canigou, the last hurrah of the walk. We went in too late, too high, but the golden light left me speechless. We went quietly though forest paths, too late to be joined by many others, accompanied as always by the glassy tinkle of icy mountain streams. It was good.

Just the tip of the iceberg really....there's still time to donate and find out more. Push the button HERE, and leave a tenner for 2 charities. After that, email me, and I'll send you the stuff listed HERE. Its nearly ready, I promise ;)

Oh yeah, and happy holidays by the way.

How to Kill a Mountain

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:00:00 +0000

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.'' Ed Abbey

This is the second of 2 posts on environmental impacts seen in the mountains of the Pyrenees. In the first post I looked at some of the most immediate and personal impacts that we make in the mountains. We know that backpacking is a lower impact way of experiencing countryside, but as discussed before, we still leave a mark unless very careful. In this post I'll try to consider some of the more structural impacts of tourism, development and increased access.

Tourism & Access

Roads and Trailheads
A trailhead allows good access to places of 'natural beauty', or backcountry areas. It is a road end, usually with turning circles, shops, toilet and refreshment facilities. This is a trailhead near the highest mountain in the Pyrenees, Aneto. There's a regular bus service in the summer every 10 minutes.

A conservation based argument for trailheads might run as follows - that they prevent further encroachment of roads into undeveloped areas with associated damage to habitat. What are trailheads accessing? In Odessa National Park, huge numbers of people are bused in and out for gentle strolls to the waterfalls and back on a highway of a path. The paths are uniform, well maintained and wide, and walking off path is discouraged. Whilst this might prevent further damage to local ecosystems, it does mean the experience is sanitised, medicated, cleaned up - as I wrote as the time, the idea of nature rather than nature itself. Does this matter if nature is conserved? Well, for starters, I'm not sure it is - buses, shops, toilets and ease of access mean more people, and more people lead to wider paths and a more frequent bus service with more roads...and so it goes on.

Then again, a trailhead may prevent what we see below - the colossal carpark at Hospital de Benasque. The Spanish seem to have a different idea of conservation to the French, one which prioritises access. In this context, trailheads start to look positively rosy.

The lakes in the Carlit region are another area easily accessed by road, and have become nature's interzone - overwalked, overfished, the wide paths constantly in need of maintenance due to erosion by massive footfall, spoilt by the spoilt. This image shows the dam, hotels and trailhead for Carlit.

Taking about access is difficult. The argument runs, that access allows remote communities to survive, and visitors to enjoy remote places. A relative lack of access means a completely urbanised population cut off from nature and alienated from its animal self and means of future sustenance.

I'd go along with this, but I think its too simplistic. My own view is that we're selling ourselves and the natural world short. By road, its all very pretty but its kept at arms length. Its too easy, too convenient. Nature is neither, nature has teeth. It may be an equally natural impulse for humans to subdue nature, to try and make it safer, but I don't want it sugarcoated. Places with easy access by road and bus service, with viewpoints and little bridges to prevent wet feet, are the Walt Disney cartoons of the outdoors - perfectly acceptable but ultimately bland and tasteless. They present us with a sanitised notion of nature and one that insulates us from a full (and sometimes uncomfortable) experience, in turn making further development, pollution and environmental degradation a certain reality. We need the friction provided by difficult travel, in order to grow as travelers.

We also know that with transport infrastructure, supply feeds demand. We know this because we have been finding it out all over Europe at least, since the invention of the car. Build it, and we will come - its a monster that's never fed. Even trailheads, seeking to control access, may end up compounding the issue by embedding a service which ends up feeding demand and stimulates growth in unsustainable tourism. This happens not because people from remote villages need to eat and work, but because people from cities like to look at scenery and like to do so in 'style'. In a tin box, with the windows up and the air con on. Eye candy.

I don't know what the answer is, but I know it isn't unfettered access. We can't keep building, or there won't be anything left to visit and get all misty eyed over. Besides, the access 'rights' of human beings aren't the only thing at stake.

Ski Resorts are big business and cause massive clearances, road building and widespread destruction of mountain habitat. Its also the choice of holiday of a privileged few. This photo shows what it does to upland areas in the eastern Pyrenees - mining for money.

I realise I'm probably in a minority here, but the effects are just massive. I'm not talking about the noble art of telemark, or ski touring, self sufficient and low impact and highly skilled. I'm talking about hotels, restaurants and nightclubs, shops and car parks on the sides and tops of mountains. I'm also less concerned with 'visual impact' and more concerned with habitat. There's no room for wildlife here, all of the top line predators - bears, wolves and lynx are extinct from the Pyrenees and there's little possibility of re-wilding because there are no corridors available - so much of the space is filled by resorts and associated infrastructure. Nothing wrong with skiing, plenty wrong with resorts. Here's a (hazy) shot of a development in Andorra - how much of the money made from these places even stays in the local economy?

I spoke with 2 French guys qualified to know about the development of skiing in the Pyrenees over the last 50 years. One worked for CIRED and the other was a refuge guardian and ski patrol worker in the Valle d'Aspe. Both were adamant that money was the driving force, and that much of the Pyrenees was impoverished as a result, both the people and the fauna. France is often mocked for its protectionism, but both pointed to the area around Lescun as a good example of resilience in the face of development. The Valle d'Aspe was almost the sole area along the range that refused the advances of ski resort development in the 60's, arguing that the local economy and therefore culture would be destroyed. As a result its one of the few areas that still produces its own sheep's cheese (Brebis, food of kings) and still has native shepherds, and a strong, vital cultural history that now attracts tourists. It was one of the areas trialled for the reintroduction of bears a few years ago. Elsewhere, shepherds were bought out, heritage demolished and hotels erected. Places like the Valle d'Aran lost it in the 60s...about which more below.

Vacation homes and other development

Much in evidence across the central Pyrenees, but especially in Andorra, which has fallen on hard times since losing it status as duty free capital of mainland Europe in the 90's. High up on the tops, Andorra is wild camp heaven, but down in the valleys urban sprawl threatens in the form of second homes for Russian oligarchs and rich Spanish entrepreneurs. In El Serrat, the highly surreal site of holiday homes at 1700ms surrounded by gardens of AstroTurf only confirmed to me that we are daily becoming more insulated from the realities of nature in all its glory:

AstroTurf. Development and gentrification was also much in evidence around Salardu in the Valle d'Aran. Where once this Valley contained its own multi dialect language and a rich culture, evidenced by many unique and ancient Romanesque churches, the opening of the Vielha tunnel put paid to its relative isolation and the developers moved in. Now its full of second homes, golf courses and ski resorts. The development continues to this day:

Here's a shot of the Hospital de Vielha which we passed a day or so earlier. Important to note that these 'hospitals' were medieval places for tradespeople and pilgrims to rest, wayfarers inns, places of refuge. Now this is just a motorway between France and Spain, the little refuge here closed for most of the year - People pass through, local economies die. I guess roads aren't working out so well here, then.

Last, but definitely not least, worth of mention are the many border towns that I walked through. Places like Parzan, Perthus, Hospitalet pres d'Andorre, and Col d'ibardin (shown below) are consumer vacuums or places of transportation only, where locals and tourists alike load up their cars on booze, fuel and perfume, taking advantage of the slightly cheaper sales tax on the Spanish side. Sometimes, like the example below, these places are completely artificial and only exist as shopping centres, other times, the border/tax equation has ripped the heart out of a thriving community. Once again, international politics and capital dictate, local culture and the environment pay the price. Every time.

Signage and interpretation is obviously essential, in case one forgets where one is:

But seriously, information is power and power is wielded over nature by information. There's a fierce debate over interpretation in art galleries and museums as it can dictate one's level of engagement or understanding. Signage outdoors could be considered as equally controversial, as illustrated by the recent debate over the No.4 gully marker on Ben Nevis. Signs confer ownership and denote importance as well as inform (or not). I'm glad to see that others found the sign above as absurd as we did, judging by the number of stones thrown at it.

The French and Spanish approaches are very different. Below, the Spanish interpretation boards around Parzan, an ancient mining area still being dug up for its extensive water resource:

Large and obtrusive signs describe the human influence in this part of the world - the mining history, the economics, and so on. Once again, the mountains are illustrated only in as much as they have instrumental value, their use for human exploitation.

Perhaps the most bizarre was a whole board describing where all the other boards were, which is what philosophers call a tautology and made me cross eyed. There's an extract shown above.

In contrast, on the French side around Portillon, things are handled with a little more tact. Single posts, which are weather worthy and double as trail markers in snow, which contain both local, natural and even mountaineering history. Here, the mountains have both instrumental and inherent value - notice is given, quite literally, to ecology and natural systems as well as human, and the area has value in and of itself - its not to be exploited but it is to be enjoyed by all its inhabitants and visitors.

Am I being picky here? Maybe, but I think these signs are important, because their purpose is education. People look to them to instruct, inform and sometimes to navigate, so the emphasis they place and how they sit in the landscape is really significant.

Lastly, then, to the types of development that are older than tourism.

Farming has taken as severe a toll in these hills as in the uplands of the UK. Land is cleared and soil is eroded. Muir called sheep 'hooved locusts' and I'm inclined to agree. Here you can see the damage caused to a hillside near Pic d'Orhy in the Basque, by overgrazing.

There's nothing wrong with sheep or cattle farming, per se, but where, when and how much are the critical questions. At the moment a balanced ecosystem is absent in many mountain regions of Europe - certainly there is a monoculture of grazing animals right across the high Pyrenees. In parts of France where wolves have been re-introduced, shepherds are suffering heavy losses to their flocks due to over predation. Wolves will choose easy pickings in an environment that is bereft of other prey due to a decline in habitat brought about through farming and over development over generations. What else would you feed on, if the hill looked like the one above, cleared of all foliage that would provide home to other species and food sources? I met a shepherd working in one of the affected areas who had returned home to the Eastern seaboard - the region had lost 300 sheep to wolves that summer, and he was crestfallen.

Supper's ready...

The same situation applies in the Pyrenees with regards to the much mooted Slovenian bear reintroduction program: twice tried, and twice failed, most shot by farmers. Its hard to blame the farmers in isolation, its their livelihood at stake, although they are compensated for flock kills by predators throughout France. There are rumours of the odd bear still lurking in the foothills, but its probably wishful thinking. These tangled webs show its difficult to parachute a rewilding program in, out of context of entire ecosystem management, and especially in areas of high population/industrial density, because its a direct challenge to our current dominance. Hard to do at all, let alone do well and without conflicts of interest - where does one start? I wonder if we shouldn't eat less lamb and beef and more rabbit and marmots, address the supply chain and deal with introduced species? Incidentally, the symbol of the French National Park system is, um... a bear.

Energy: By far the chief resource extraction in any mountain range is energy, be it mining of rock, mineral, but mostly, water. Its our most precious resource and mountains are full of it. Mountains are the home of watersheds and controllers of climate on a global scale. We extract water in vast quantities and the Pyrenees is no exception. Below, the tapping of mountains at Refuge de la Soula:

and at Hospitalet pres d'Andorre, a transport hub and power station on the border.

In most cases, the water is used to generate electricity. Cheap and clean? Its cheaper and cleaner than coal, oil or nuclear, that much is certain. But what happens to the water table, the river habitats and the plants and animals that depend on them? In common with the UK, many of the lakes in the Pyrenees are also dammed. We really have it covered, if you'll pardon the pun. Dams mean drowned valleys and the destruction of more habitat. Water exploitation is severe and has changed the landscape dramatically.

The story of any conservation movement is the story of resource exploitation and a story of attrition: enclosures, clearances, overgrazing, forced planting, hydro electricity, nuclear, wind. Its easy to point the finger, and naive to suggest we can't do without at least some of this energy. But the elephant in the room is how much we use, and the fact that there is almost no concession to the environmental damage caused by such intrusions. An increasingly small monopoly of companies are quite literally making a killing. Nature labours, and our markets and institutions exploit, and that means ultimately we are paying...why, so a shareholder can buy a second (or third, or fourth) home? Possibly in Andorra, surrounded by astroturf, on concrete foundations laid over small, local and culturally diverse communities. To what end, gluttony or happiness?

Whats left?
I may have painted an overly bleak picture of the Pyrenees. It is a stunningly beautiful place still, you should go there, travel lightly and quietly, by foot. In many places there were examples of nature resisting our worst attempts at destruction. A few days before Hospitalet pres d'Andorre and a depressing resupply, camped in the S bend of a motorway, I walked into a verdant valley full of crickets and butterflies, bees and wild flowers, so busy it was difficult not to tread on the insects filling the path. They were everywhere. It was a chattery, joyful paradise. Just by the dam shown above, the railway line that helped engineers build the dam was slowly being reclaimed by the forest, the iron railings rusting and contorted, the sleepers rotting away to nothing. High above Lescun, the Isards played off trail in large groups, highly adapted with powerful front legs, covering ground that would take a walker 15minutes in a matter of seconds. I pushed on through alpine pasture without water and a little lost, my way carpeted in wild flowers. There is stone that imitates wood when wet and flowers that grow on stone without soil. There is talus, rubble the size of buses and cars that stretches out for half a days walk, reminders of an endlessly changing geology. Bullet hard granite smoothed by glaciation over unimaginable timescales, surreal limestone dreamworlds, milky white quartzite crests and waves, the solid in motion, frozen, incomprehensible and bewitching. There are salamanders, snakes and frogs, and black carpenter bees and rare jersey moths. Buzzards, eagles, kites and vultures fly patrol. The water is plentiful, mostly, and clean, nearly always. The weather is wild and changeable. There is peace and there is quiet, and there is adventure and humility.

It really is special and the French National Parks system, in particular, is trying to learn from past mistakes and keep it that way. I had the sense they 'get' conservation in a way that many of the parks on the Spanish side did not - the natural world has an inherent value, regardless of how humans exploit it for themselves. We do not just hold this in trust 'for future generations' to enjoy, we hold it in trust because it is unique, magnificent, intricate, dazzling, and full of wonder. I think its worth looking after even if I could never visit again. Its way beyond us, hugely reductive to see it merely as a tourist or energy resource.

But the encroachments of humans are serious and long term, and things I saw on the HRP are mirrored elsewhere too. Humans are rapidly and systematically reducing the number of flora and fauna on the planet, we have reversed evolution, the drive to diversify, and have installed monoculture and inbreeds everywhere with horrific results. It's genocide on a massive scale, largely through habitat destruction, and driven through development. We are not, as I've mistakenly written in the past, the keystone species, we are much more like parasites - consume all, move on.

Closer to home, people have said to me, ''motorway laybys, wildest places in Britain, Dave'' with an air of patronising smugness, as if they talk to a romantic Essentialist or a Luddite who wants to deliver them back to feudal times. Clearly they haven't read the manual. And this, to quote a friend, sees us "damned by faint praise''. Is that the sum of our ambition, are motorway laybys the best we can do? Is that now the wildest it gets?

So, how should responsible, conscious parasites act? We need to legislate to protect whats left of our wild land, and we need to do it now. Without full legal protection for places we agree to keep free of development and resource exploitation, there can be no freedom or equality - for animals or for people. These places are sometimes called 'wild', and we need more of them not less, so we should be attempting to reverse engineer our more recent excesses and reclaim spaces for nature, before we lose them forever, and ourselves into the bargain. There's alot at stake, and nobody else in charge. We are the only stewards, and its our coffin too.

We're in!

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:09:00 +0000

Summit of Bidean nam Bian, our first munro, may 2010

Crikey. It seems providence has smiled and Tanya and I will be (re)introduced to Scotland under the fine tutelage of the moderators for the TGO challenge 2012.

The TGOC is about camaraderie. The TGOC is not competitive. The TGOC is a celebration of the finest hill country in the UK. Bless you, Hamish Brown.

It'll be great to meet so many kindred spirits, including some fellow bloggers whose work I've long admired. There's still quite a bit to do before then. Like moving from London to Edinburgh. I suppose it'll all settle down, and this will be an amazing way to celebrate our arrival and get to know our new home just a little bit more. My nanna from Inverness would have approved, so this post is for her. I just hope there's enough time to do some route planning.

A Cambrian Caper

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:40:00 +0000

Four of us set off early on friday 4th November for the Elan Valley in mid Wales and a weekend backpack.
This is the route I had planned, which bears a strong resemblance to Martin's walk here. It pained me slightly to do such a similar route but then Martin does put together good routes, so what can you do!

It was a good little bimble over mostly easy gentle hills, notwithstanding the bog, groundwater and tussocks which were considerable. On the first night we found a great pitch by a small river, just before it started to rain. For the remainder of the weekend, the weather was fairly mild and very clear. On the second night we stayed in the Claerddu bothy owned by the Elan Valley Trust. It was beautifully kept and whisky was imbibed. The last day we walked the Monks Trod, a muddy but ancient path with some access issues. We saw star jelly, fox moth caterpillars (not rare) many red kites and 2 cormorants, practiced a little timing/pacing, had to cut corners on the route in order to complete the walk without breaking ankles in the dark, but it was still nice to get some wind in the sails again after a month or 2 back in the city. Before we dashed back to Babylon we stopped at the Cornhill Inn, a friendly local boozer in Rhayeader with a wood burner and superbly kept ales that change weekly.

If I had to change anything I would make better use of the limited daylight hours and set off by 7.30 or 8am - now that the clocks have gone forward, its pitch dark by 5.15pm in the hills. I would also dispense with following some of the paths and stay on the tops, although it was fairly boggy up there too.

For the first time I wore trail shoes (not boots) with a multiday load (albeit only 2 days food) - something I have been building towards gradually for about 18 months, and it worked out fine. Strengthening legs and feet needs to be done over time, I think, or maybe its just a confidence thing... but I wouldn't put money on that, probably its both. My friends all wore leather boots and had wet feet too - no chance of keeping dry through bog and tussock - but I think I've seen the last of soggy, heavy boots for myself in 3 seasons. Jury still out about full-on snow/ice footwear for me at the moment. I adopted joe's method of using thin neoprene socks, specifically the NRS 0.5mm sock, purchased from the UK distributor, Rapid Kayaks, who were extremely quick and helpful. Worn with just a merino liner sock, this caboodle stopped my toes getting too cold, even when stationary - the volume is small so circulation was fine, its a good setup.

I felt energised and fleet footed at about 7.5kg all in, bouncing along on the walk, even jogging up little hills. Things are getting easier and evolving.

Here's a few more photos on flickr

Leaving a trace

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:08:00 +0000

''I think that all schoolchildren from grade 1 to grade 12 should spend one day a week in the out of doors. I'd rather see our kids wondering around in the hills, along the rivers, out in the desert, up in the mountains, than sitting all day staring at a video screen, pushing buttons for IBM''

Ed Abbey, University of Utah Speech, 1988

This is the first of 2 posts about environmental related stuff I witnessed on the HRP.
Doing a long walk means you notice how different countries, regions and National Parks within them deal with the pressures of farming, development and tourism. Mainly what we are talking about is people pressure - there's more of us out there, and that impacts on the mountain environment, which has consequences for animal habitat and for humans who live and work there, as well as for visitors. Some impacts are down to individual behaviours... and alot is down to how the machinery of capital works to consume and move on, shifting its costs back to the environment in order to maximise short term profit for stakeholders. We're implicated in both of course, and there's a difficult balance to be struck between access, development and conservation for those in gatekeeper positions. It goes to the heart of what we value non urbanised space for, and why. Solutions aren't easy, or comfortable. But then we know that, its why we're resistant to change.

Lets look at the more micro side of things first, as its maybe the easiest to address. You may find some of the images below depressing or distressing, I know I do. And not just the poop ones.

Litter.

There's litter in many places along the HRP, but more so in Spain than in France. As you might expect, areas with trailhead or road access suffer more, as casual walkers or tourists are able to get to the hills more easily - so there's more volume in these places. But, consistently, the culprits are climbers or hikers. You can tell because of the type of rubbish - Invariably you see empty tins of fish, energy bars and other hiking food wrappers at the start of climbing routes, stuffed into the gaps between rocks, or on trails away from roads where carrying out trash weight might be considered an inconvenience by the user. I saw evidence of this at many of the wild camps I made.

There's also a heap of rubbish in and around many unmanned huts. Not all, but lots of them, especially in Spain and Andorra, which is where most of the unmanned refuges are. The photos above show one such hut in Catalonia, complete with rotting sandwiches, empty bottles, tins and several black bin bags (just out of shot) full of decaying trash. The signage hangs on the wall of the hut outside. I spoke to a few hikers, from all over Europe, who couldn't understand why the manned refuges don't accept litter or make bins available for their guests - the idea is that you carry out what you bring in. And these were often seasoned walkers. Maybe it tells us where we might need to target better education in order to prevent littering by more frequent, even professional users of open spaces. Is 'Leave no Trace' fully integrated into outdoor sports training, for all ages? Schools everywhere, not just in rural communities? Scouts and Guide groups? Ultimately, it leaves me with more questions than I have answers for... and a feeling of sadness.

Its not just day trippers...

Most people know littering is not 'a good thing'. Here you can see the efforts someone has gone to hide their rubbish under a rock. Or maybe they didn't want it to blow away, because that would be, y'know, littering. Before...

...and after. I was astonished that there were 2 wrappers, so not only was this deliberate and premeditated, but both walkers may have agreed that this was a viable option...or maybe a solo hiker was especially hungry. Either way is strange behaviour.

I know many of us pick up rubbish that others drop - but that's not always possible on a through hike. Its also awkward to challenge someone you see in the act of littering, and mostly you just see the result anyway, not the culprit doing. Walking in small groups on the HRP showed me that people really resent rules when they are out - they don't want to be told what not to do, because they are 'getting away from all that'. Its understandable, so explaining why there are guidelines seemed the most sensible option - some context or background - a banana skin takes 2 years to rot down and isn't native to this habitat, for example. It felt important to keep explaining and questioning, so we don't forget how to and risk seeing everything as a confrontation.

A good friend also reminded me of something very important towards the end of the walk - litter is noticeable in the mountains because it is still relatively rare. Its not the city, and even there not everyone does it. The trouble with rubbish is that even one piece sets a precedent, but its good not to be too cynical about it.

Hunting.

Clearly this was, and still is, a huge issue in the Pyrenees, especially in the Basque region. Please look at this link which shows more about the infrastructure behind what I saw - hundreds of huts, shacks, treehouses and hunters bivy's along the route of the HRP. This link is also excellent. There is hunting with shotgun, and net, using mirrors to dazzle the birds. Mainly its for wood pigeon, but birds of prey are killed both accidentally and illegally. The numbers of migratory birds crossing from Africa over the Basque have reduced by 75% in the last 30 years. In my view, all hunting purely for sport is not 'culture', its species genocide. Its too late to argue about this, we're witness to an unprecedented level of extinction that is entirely man made - we don't need to kill stuff for kicks and giggles as well. Companies arrange trips for money, whats the individual sport-hunters excuse?

Graffiti.

I like graffiti in some places, it can be a reclaiming of an oppressive space when creatively done. But, its all about context. Unfortunately, people feel the need to tag the natural world too. The image below shows graf on 'the finger', a highly fragile and crumbling rock on the ridge approach to Taillon, near the Breche de Roland. This is at around 3000m.

Why is it that we need to mark everything? Are we that impotent in our everyday lives? Is the natural world no more than a blank canvas for our enormous egos? Aside from anything else, spray paint is highly toxic, both to user and ecosystem.

Then again, lets look at some more formal vandalism. This is a cromlech, the remains of a 10,000 year old (megalithic era) stone circle situated near the Col d'Orgambide in the Basque region, with a new addition. In terms of landscape the area feels similar to the west country - wide open with huge horizons and quite flat. Above me huge numbers of Lammergeier flew in perfect formation, stately, slow moving warplanes. I descended onto this plateau under the watchful gaze of these feathery undertakers and the Urculu tower, a roman construction sitting on a huge and spiny ridge of limestone that signaled a shift from lower to higher ground on the walk. Along this way passed the armies of Hannibal, the Romans, and Charlemagne's nephew, Roland. The latter is fascinating to me because it shows how facts can become entwined with fantasy via aural history and folk tales to create giants, myths and religious icons, all to serve the regional politics of feudal Europe. Its fascinating to the locals because he famously lost a battle to the Basques at the nearby Ronceveau pass. Anyway, he's a central figure in these parts and stories about him have been bound up with the history of various tribes that live in this region for centuries. I knew very little of this as I walked through, but I did feel a definite sense of the past, which has prompted some reading since. Its a strange and atmospheric place full up with memories, both warring and living in sync with animals and the surrounding wood, water and rock over huge timescales. A tangible feeling and very odd and all tied up with the way the ancient paths fit into the landscape as you approach the col.

However, the local authorities thought it wasn't interesting enough, so hired a stonemason in 2006 to make some changes.

...perhaps not setting the best example.

Fires.
Everyone loves a campfire. Around Carlit and Canigou, both popular destinations for family camping in the East of the Pyrenees, the area is littered with firecircles. The exciting photo below features both firecircle and toilet paper - I know, I'm spoiling you.

Why the problem, making a fire is carbon neutral isn't it? Well, kinda, but not really. Its the most carbon efficient way of cooking, but its not neutral...nothing is. Also, one begets another, and before you know it you have a campsite. Then you just destroyed the reason you are going there for: to be nearer nature. Much more importantly, fire degrades the area by removing crucial habitat for animals right across the ecosystem in the form of rotting wood. It also burns the ground and kills plant and insect life directly. Fires work and are fun, when kept small and when multiple circles are not established. Avoid building a new fire - if there's a preexisting circle use that instead. Keep it small and put large flat stones on the ground underneath the fire to prevent scorching. The best option is just to bring a stove.

I've been told by another walker that 'leave no trace' is ''just a catchphrase'' when I questioned the needless production of another firecircle. A discussion ensued which got somewhat heated. It's a symptom of a common mentality - many have grown weary of campaigns, and think the outdoors has value only insofar as it can be used (up) by humans - instrumental value. I'll return to this - its at the heart of how we see 'outside'.

Toilet.
Areas with trailheads and road access do seem to suffer most here. Casual walkers have different priorities than people staying over in the mountains. Chiefly, water. They are carrying theirs in, and we are usually not. Therefore people will often relieve themselves near streams, lakes or another water source as it doesn't matter to them practically, if the water is polluted.

Casual walkers or day trippers may also feel uncomfortable or embarrassed about going to the toilet outdoors, which I think goes someway to explaining the mess that is left - huge amounts of paper covering the deed, often done in a what looks like a hurry, near water or on trail. Around the unmanned huts, there was often a serious waste issue as well, enough to warrant compostable toilets.

Is it a problem, surely its organic waste isn't it? Well, it is a problem for animals and other humans if we pollute the water supply. And toilet paper and the rest is a visual eyesore and can take months if not years to rot down, especially in higher altitudes - if the paper is not organically sourced it leaves bleaches and other chemicals in the soil and water table. The photo below shows the lakeside of Estany Negre in Catalonia, near a beautiful wild campsite that had evidently been used in an otherwise responsible way, for many centuries. I needed to drink from both water sources shown in this section.

So, just to be clear, and please forgive the instructional tone for a second longer: Carry a toilet trowel or other digging tool, go at least 30ms away from water, dig a hole at least as deep as the toilet trowel handle, bury your offering and the paper, which should be organic, or if not, burn it or take it out. If you are burning it, make sure you don't set fire to anything else. In snow, dig down to the topsoil, or better still pack one of these, and carry out. If digging is difficult because the ground is too hard, go between boulders (long drop) and remove the paper, or carry it all out. This link from the MCofS is about the most comprehensive advice I can find on the subject.

Its unlikely that I'm going to intervene whilst someone is in the middle of a movement, so its down to education this one. Not knowing how to is not a crime, not explaining is. We all have to go.

Pressure of numbers.

There's a bit of aloofness in the outdoors world, and sometimes I fall prey to that too - I vant to be alone! But generally speaking, I like others to appreciate it as much as I do. To that end I don't mind sharing the peak of Carlit (shown above) at 9.30am with alot of enthusiastic day trippers, so long as they look after themselves and each other and the mountain they are walking on. I walked in from my solo campsite right underneath the mountain at 8.30am whilst they drove from their hotel at 5am... but still I like that they made the effort to come at all - the ascent of the eastern ridge is an exhilarating scrambly challenge for the relatively new. I would mind if the rest of the trail was as busy as this summit, but thankfully I can still share it with the odd walker yet find lots of solitude and peace on the way, by through hiking. I generally stay miles away from places like Goriz, pictured below.

Goriz, incidentally, is the refuge between the Breche de Roland and the trailheads of the Odessa Canyon, and is situated just over the minimum height of 2100ms where 'aire de bivouac' - camping between sunset and sunrise - is permitted in this NP. As such it is under tremendous pressure of numbers. As you can see they are building an extension. What you can't see is the terrifying state of the toilet block, the woefully under equipped tourists and scouting groups camping all around and the human excrement in the nearby water supply. Its an accident waiting to happen.

This all begs the question of access. How easy should it be to get to the outdoors? Do I want roads right to the foot of the mountains? Should there be facilities in case people get thirsty or tired, and if so, what kind? Should we provide rangers to make sure people are safe? Is it always demand led, or should we say 'stop' to certain developments - if so, on what grounds, and who decides? Shouldn't we have to make an effort to get there, to extert ourselves physically and mentally and feel the benefits of this? Isn't saying this elitist?

These are questions that must cause National Park, Conservation and other NGO staff sleepless nights - it can't be easy or even possible to reconcile the demands of access versus those of conservation. In the next post I'll take a look at development, farming and tourism within this bigger framework of questions. I'll try not to rant, but no promises.

But before I go....

The Leave No Trace message is framed under seven principles:

Plan Ahead and Prepare
Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces
Dispose of Waste Properly
Leave What You Find
Minimize Campfire Impacts
Respect Wildlife
Be Considerate of Other Visitors

A smorgasboard of gentle adventuring

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 22:13:00 +0000

My mate Tim came out to do a 17 day chunk of the HRP with me, and he's one tough mutha. He's also a proper photographer and you can find his brand new fancy page here. When he's not doing amazing things with his camera there, he's rubbing our noses in it, here. Click 'em to make biggerer...

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Andy's HRP photos

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 10:39:00 +0000

photo: Andy 'Thorne' Reynolds

This is a post to tell you about my mate Andy's photos from his HRP traverse, which are now online HERE. They are great, especially the ones of flora and fauna, and show another take on the journey through similar terrain, as well the section we walked together.

Firm friendships are made or frayed on these big walks and I'm happy to say that I consider the geezer above right to be a brother from another mother. He's a modest man but its worth pointing out he did 3/5's of the walk solo, including a ton of summits on the remote Andorran stage, which is no mean feat. On the last stage, we made a kickass team. Checks and balances, no pride, how it should be.

The photo above is a timer shot he set up when we got in to Banyuls after 2 months. The official finish of the walk is the same as the GR10, the hotel on the seafront which has this tiled artwork on it. The English tourists look at you funny when you come into town, but a few of the locals give you the nod.

Haute Route Pyrenees - Trip Report

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:06:00 +0000

Those who follow the blog regularly will know that I'm not going to publish the full report here - that's reserved for those who donate £10 or more to the charities I chose to raise money for by doing the walk. If you fancy getting more of an insight, donate, then send your details to davepowered(you know where)gmail(you know what)com - let me know your name, email, what you donated and when.... and you'll get a report when its done.

What will that look like? Here's what I'm working on:

1. An audio report. Thought long and hard about this one, nothing does it justice, but the audio diary I made at the time is more immediate than writing up a journal after the fact from a badly scrawled notebook, so audio it is.

2. A slideshow. The terrain and the story. A big walk is a proper yarn so it is.

3. The best 10 or so as screensavers, full size jpegs. Maybe some prints as well, if people are interested. These would be at cost plus a donation, any and all money raised from this venture is going to the two charities, forever.

4. A folder of resources: the maps required, good (and not so good) resupply points, route reflections and amendments to the Cicerone Joosten guide, which is a problematic but still useful book, and a breakdown of the kit I took and how it performed over 2 months from coast to coast. Some A-B test results in there too as friends had different kit.

It might take a few months to get this together...

Recording the days audio report in a cave used by climbers attempting 'the portal', Valle de Remune

There will of course be some more posts about my take on the HRP, available to all on this 'ere web journal thingy.

And on that note, here's the first part of an interview I did with Podcast Bob on the Outdoors Station about the walk. And here's the second part. I don't know whats so funny, nervous laughter I guess. Sorry about that.

Finally, to all those that donated, we have so far raised over £3000 including the gift aid, for WILD LAND AND REFUGEES. Its really a great result, you made a difference, so thankyou.

Home

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:33:00 +0000

Camping and moving, camping and moving. Mobility is such a blessing. Then, comfort in small things - warmth, shelter, hot food. A complete resetting of value, nothing taken for granted. It might take time to find the best spot.

The simplicity of backpacking might be its biggest draw for me. Try not to fall off, get lost, or run out of food or water - not always easy to do, but easy to understand. A good campsite is the reward at the end of each day if I manage these things. I like it best when the camping is simple too - less gear and less faff. Everything in its right place, the porridge, coffee and sugar at the top of the food sack for the morning, knife in left hipbelt pocket, headtorch in my left boot as I bed down, and so on. Because we're on the move every day, it helps to be organised in the little things, like breakfast or storage, because it allows flexibility in the big things, like the walk.

In some ways, the story of the camps is the story of the trip. So I thought I'd collect some of the photos in one place, and try to tell it that way:

Cooking pasta at the end of the second day's walk, camping on a ridge 800m above Arizkun. A shepherd drove right up to the shelter and I thought I was done, but he seemed really pleased I was there, gesturing to the land and saying, 'its free, its beautiful, enjoy it!' Terrible water supply but incredible dawn sun.

Camping outside the religious centre of Roncesvalles - a dull camp near a tourist path which nevertheless provided water and shelter. The wind had a habit of changing direction the minute I pitch, I notice. Once it got dark, it dropped to nothing and the bugs were in heavy attendance.

First glamour camp near a tiny bridge down from Urculu. Made food over firewood and had a strip wash in the river and the rain after getting a bit dehydrated. Quite a view, I slept like a babe that night, all lined up for the col in the morning. First conversation in 5 days the morning after this one.

Bad photo but a great camp after the Pic d'Orhy, the first 2000m peak. I'd got a little sunstroke the day before this and had stopped early, so had alot of ground to make up. A long day but that meant walking down to this sweet valley as the shadows lengthened across d'Orhy. Sublime.

The morning after first serious swipe, at Source de Marmitou. I'd got lost, without water in the karst limestone labyrinth that forms the Aries de Anie, the big chain around Lescun. Came down to the source at 11pm, completely frazzled. Was so thirsty I was licking the water as it condensed on the trekking poles, stumbling and falling down though a cloud inversion with my red beam on. Idiot.

First wild camp with the boys, above Borse. This was a GR10 detour but well worth it, we stopped early because I'd taken one of them up Pic d'Anie the day before and he was feeling it. A great camp, another inversion at dawn and Midi d'Ossau on the horizon.

Hut above the Chemin de la Mature. A nice place to pull up after blistering heat and horsefly mayhem. God it was hot. Don't even think about doing the Chemin in the afternoon.

A few days later and the weather has turned. This is in the Valle de Pleasance under the Col de Cambrales after a good 12 hours of rain - you can see the Trailstar silnylon sagging with the wet. Nic and Andy had rolled up about 11pm out of the blue. After getting our fingers burnt under Palas I wasn't going anywhere high, in this weather in a hurry. We sat tight until the dreich stopped and siege charged the col en masse. Belt and braces, good tactics. Bonus lie in, too.

A freezing cold and damp night for 3 of us under Vignemale, under cloud, which thankfully cleared as dawn broke. Again, we had stopped early to let the weather do its thing, the right decision. Meths stoves meet their limits in this kind of clinging cold, so breakfast was painfully slow. Could barely strike camp, hands were so cold.

One of my favourites this spot - somewhere on the plateau between Goriz and the Breche de Roland. The wind had really picked up and so we found a little depression for the TS to sit in. The mountains all around were like walnut whip, all swirly like. Elemental and moody.

Drying everything out properly and decompressing at the campsite, Gavarnie, after picking up a resupply at the office de tourisme. After that, go get pizza, its the best thing in town.

Two from the Barroude Lakes. We'd misjudged the day before and came in about 8.30pm under heavy cloud, navigated OK from the Heas pass purely on map and compass, zero visibility which I was fairly pleased about. If there's no views you might as well get it done well and not loiter. Friendly guardian with huge afro, en familie running the hut when we poked our heads in. We parked up in front of where the lake was supposed to be, but couldn't see a thing. Then, at 11pm, the cloud cleared. The wall above is just vast, and the lake has tiny humpbacked islands and peninsulas full of cottongrass and marmots. You might just make out the glacier in the first shot hanging above the shelter. Joosten calls this place 'a dreamers delight', and he's not wrong about that one bit.

Weird spot at the Refuge de la Soula. The refuge building is what used to be the workers dormitory, next to a hydro station dressed up in Swiss colour scheme. We had to sneak into someone's room whilst they were eating to get water and to wash - we only found the communal kitchen afterward. Miserable staff, mosquitoes the size of sparrows, not sure who the strange woman is. Don't stop here, there's a nice plateau about half an hour before.

Another favourite, the Valle de Remune. This was an early stop after the most technical section of the trip, the fabled 'E' days. We'd walked down through talus for about 5 hours after the Col de Inferior de Literole, crampons and axe required. A tiny gorge in the making, then opened out into a wide valley with climbers bivy's all around. Bliss to stop early and kick about exploring and making food, then not long for bed.

Wet camera. After we got our butts kicked off Aneto, the weather followed us down the hill to our campspot here on the plain below... right next to a sign 'camping interdit'. A ferocious thunderstorm meant we were drenched in seconds after a 12hour day and 2800ms of ascent/descent. Oh well, it was better in the morning.

The camp at the end of the following day was the scene of possibly the worst storm of the trip - insane winds, and to top it all some sort of rodent ran over both our heads in the night - T was not best pleased! We'd got stuck up near the Tuc de Mulet looking for the Col, which is a near vertical scramble to get down a razor edged ridge, but made it eventually. A few hours of peace, then the thunderstorm started left of the photo and moved our way fast. Didn't get much sleep that night, pole worked its way out the middle of the shelter but was easily fixed.

The next days camp was a peach. Its just off the GR11 and we had it to ourselves, as we did most often. The winds and weather were mostly behind us and the evening light made fireworks on the tops all around us as we washed on a beach at one of the hundreds of lakes. I was in seventh heaven at 2400ms, this place is wonderful.

After Salardu and heading towards Andorra. Thomas' first wild camp. The mountain we have to do after breakfast lies across the lake. There's no path and its much much steeper than it looks. But for now, darkness falls quickly, there's the occasional fish 'plop' in the still water, and the bells of the horses across the way usher us to sleep.

Possibly one of the best spots on the whole trip, just down from summiting Certescan and a hailstorm. I've got better shots of the location, but this one, taken just after dawn with coffee and with the sun powering up the day seems to sum up the mood. Thomas had found his mountain legs by this point and scouted out this great pitch, high above a lake and between 2 breathless, gurgling streams. A real pleasure to see him enjoying it so much.

Evening of my birthday, camping near the Coma Pedrosa after a real belter of a walk. Really can't ask for more, would happily settle for less.

Another lovely spot in Andorra near the Coms de Jan. We were covering ground fast by then and had time to pitch up in good time, wash, eat and relax. The night sky here was just incredible, we kept making tea and stayed up late looking at the stars framed by this wonderful valley.

The last camp before the Hospitalet pres d'Andorre resupply, near the lakes under Pic de Rulhe. Another early finish, a swim, a snooze and a walk round the lake, taking it in our stride by now. Andorra is very fine camping country.

Back on my own for a few days, a windy but worth it camp, lined up for Carlit in the morning. I'd pushed on longer to get high and avoid the crowds lower down in the valley, and it paid off with a swift, silent sunset and a wild and lonely pitch. Its now later in the season so getting dark earlier. Enjoying the freedom of being my own boss again.

After Carlit, the walk down is long and busy. I found more loneliness than I knew what to do with at the Estany de Negre, where I sheltered from warm soft rain. The flies congregated in their hundreds in the eves of the shelter, and in the night I was awoken by a large creature barking very closeby. I'm pretty sure it was a deer, but at the time I was unnerved - I'd heard stories about feral dogs and it was in no hurry to leave. I banged my pot loudly as it pawed the ground outside my shelter. An unsettled night.

Had arranged by text to meet up with Andy high in the Valle de Enye, which somehow we managed. Was great to see him again, he was clearly in his element now. We pitched near a big fire circle and got through 2 bottles of wine. Very windy but the rain held off.

Two from a night next door to a ski run, right under the nose of a refuge which didn't promise much but turned out ok. We'd walked the frankly awe inspiring Noarre ridge in the days before, and we're aware the high ground was ending soon. That night saw the first frost and temperatures of -5.

Under Canigou at 6.15am, all lined up for 'the chimney' that morning. We'd walked in late the night before and overplayed our hand really, looking for the lakes but didn't quite find them. A genuinely beautiful walk in long and quiet amber shadows, the light had really changed now we were near the Mediterranean. It got dark and cold, but we found a wind null, pitched up and in the morning saw the lakes 200m away. It was nice not to have to rush off early, we were only an hour or so from the top. A second sub zero night.

We lucked in, after walking the ancient Balcon de Canigou path, which contours in a wonderful arc underneath the last big mountain of the trip, and found this beautiful unmanned shelter the day after. We loaded up on firewood, washed and dried clothes around the stupidly efficient burner which turned the place into a sauna, and emptied the jar of hot chocolate previous walkers had left. Table and chairs, unfathomable luxury! Our knees appreciated the finer aspects of civilisation. My retirement home.

After that, it gets less exciting. Arles sur Tech, we resupplied in a very unglamourous and miserable 7-11 and camped on the edge of a college playing field. There was fruit. And more wine.

The next day its all steep ascents through sweet chestnut and wandering along through endless scrub. Hot, dry, flies. We avoided getting gored by the bull and slipping on cowshit, and pitched near an old saw mill, pretty much on the path. Water is scarce.

The first night I've ever spent in a Napoleonic Cemetery, for sure. A fantastic sleep of the dead about half an hour outside Perthus, marred by a terrible lack of fresh water. Or any water. Enough to eat and drink, just, but not enough to wash or feel comfortable. Don't believe the map about water sources, its all lies.

Our last camp, before the med. A fire circle, solemn thoughts, and sanguine conversation. In the morning, I'm singing Dylan's 'One more cup of Coffee', an ominous hobo tune if ever there was, before we descend to the sea. A good spot, well found Andy.

So, this is what it boils down to at the finish. Camping at the Municipal campsite in Banyuls, you get issued with a pitch number, you sleep on dusty rock-hard earth, on cardboard boxes you nick from the local supermarket. Its rubbish but the showers are hot, which is cold, cold comfort. A fitting end to a grand endeavour.

I walked the HRP for 2 great charities - the JMT and Soundmix. If you didn't donate yet, you can still do that, here Everyone who donates £10 or more gets a Trip Report bundle. The blog will not contain the full report. Donate, then send your details to davepowered(you know where)gmail(you know what) com and you'll get a report when its done. Thanks

Ben Circular

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:42:00 +0000

By way of celebration of moving to Scotland, and since I was there for a meeting anyway, I decided to go back into Glen Nevis the following day. The plan was to line myself up near Steall in the afternoon, then to walk JMT land the next day - Aonach Beag and Mor, the CMD arete and then onto the Ben. The weather however, was filthy. So I went round.

Into the Glen, pasture and grazing, farmland. A place of many torrents, trees, fine rain and sunlight dancing on the flanks. A place of water and rock, also poaching.

The Ben under clag, matt grey powder, effortlessly sullen.

The river is high and moving swiftly, the sun doesn't stay long.

The glen roars forever, wet things grow here.

Rain all night on the meadow. A broken lighter, getting better with a firesteel by necessity. In the morning, water risen by near a foot.

Strike camp, then across the wire bridge to the hut for a hot cuppa. Bracing as the cables move in the wind. Not back that way! Knee deep across the rivers under the falls. Wind up and steady driech, making for Coire Guibsachan, no tops today.

So much water. Fording knee deep bogs and rivers. To a watershed at 830ms, scree sided, po faced, often pathless, sodden but heading straight north.

Open country on the other side, a wide river basin with a inflatable orange boat left abandoned in the torrent at 430ms, proclaiming 'we're out here'. Just me here though not quite alone. Nevis stands watch with furrowed brow portside, the slippery ruptured scales of Aonach Mor flank me on the starboard. Torrents.

Later, a flat plain, an old dam and a wide track to forestry land. A walk along a path turned into mountain bike track through conifer.

North of the Ben and as plantation stops, the path turns left towards the Fort, a long straight line next to a golf course.

Past industry, making use of hill water to power a smelter. Rio Tinto Alcan have been here for a long time.

Expanding the energy capacity at this site.

So much water.

Bare on Night Mountain

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:59:00 +0000

...is the parable of the Goat, the Fish and the Dog.

In the last post, I tried to describe how my outlook and experience changed over the length of the HRP. This post describes a key moment in that journey. It's a confession, and a catalogue of errors, because things got a little bit too epic for comfort. I'm not proud of my part in it. Incidentally, the names have not been changed to protect the innocent, they were the names we gave to each other at the time.

As always, click on the images to make bigger.

The tale of the night begins with the day, and continues through to the end of the next. It starts wet, drying out. We had camped in a wide sided valley down from Pombie after soup and a half sleep in a thunderstorm and waking up in 2 inches of water on the backside of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau. Thanks heavens for bivy bags when the heavens open. I'll have to come back for the third time to make it to the top of that one then, on the walk out water is still crashing down the sides, and visibility is not more than 20ms at the Col de Suzon, no chance and no views so what for anyway. And so we're still sluggish and waterlogged as we pull up through woodland then a mist shrouded valley towards Arremoulit. The Fish isn't really coping, his gears grinding, until I take his tent and mat again, a whopping 4 kgs, my teeth grinding. He perks up after this. I move away, lugging the dead weight, sweating and furious. This is the familiar pattern of the last week. He is out of his depth, but making the rest pay dearly. I stopped feeling bad for him a day or so ago, now I just feel bad.

2 hours later, I sit just off the col in thick cloud and wait. After a snack, I realise I don't have map and case, normally clipped into the mini caribiner at my shoulder. Providence. I'm ready to snap, and its got right in the way of the walk, concentrating on pride and anger instead of group safety. I must now eat words, bite tongue and find map. I am lucky, though. A Basque couple saw it laying on the path and passed it to on to the others. Little is said as my co walkers return it...we all know whats afoot.

We are heading for the Passage d'Orteig, a vertiginous but chained short section of the walk that I have done before, but is new to my friends. We hang right at the sign for the 'delicate passage' and line up for it, the Dog at the front and me behind. I have hyped this alot as the Fish gets vertigo, and to his credit he wants to deal with this head on and doesn't flinch when he sees the drop. The Dog will do just fine. We start in on the narrow part before the ropes and I start talking. Distraction is the better part of valour. If you fall, fall to the right. Don't forget to breathe, or you'll die. And so on.

Its fine in the end, the hype pays off and it was all a storm in a teacup right? There's one part I still don't like, where the rock juts out and the basque couple tie in, but we're plucky brits and don't carry rope (only because we don't know how to use it). Up and over past a line of beautifully constructed cairns made to guide us in to one of the best refuges on the HRP. Loitering at the refuge with soup and a catnap, tarp out to dry a little.

3pm. The first mistake. We leave for the Col de Palas. I have reservations which I share, but limply, not wanting to say we are moving too slowly, letting the others growing confidence after the Passage override. Its too early to stop. Its not too far on the map, n'est pas? The cloud may clear further up. We move easier and refreshed up to the lakes above the refuge and onto the team's first snowfield. The approach to the Col is as good a first time experience of snow in high mountains as I could wish for my friends. Firm but not rock solid, crags atmospherically shrouded but not overtly threatening. Spooky but not scary - the mysteries of rocky strata beckon us on. I love this world above the brush and the tundra, its become my reason for walking in the Pyrenees but its fickle up here. And its too late to go up, in this weather and with this team. Judgment calls. I don't answer.

A Spanish team passes us on their way down and seems in good spirits, we continue on, in denser cloud, on fields of boulders growing larger, until the chilly col is reached. We go left at the top cairn and contour around steeply on slippery red shale and scree, treachery draped in soggy mist, our movements slowing, grinding to a halt. Pace is required but not forthcoming, I should've called it then but there is no way the Fish is backtracking on this eroded mess, he's unnerved, the path has fallen away to nothing and its only our handholds that are holding his footholds in place.

Because of the mist and the slow progress and the wanting it to be so, we reach two cairns and assume its the Port de Lavedan. At first, then no joy. It looks like a col in 5 metres visibilty and the map tells us nothing at all at 1.50K. Not happy. We get busy with map and compass, Goat on forays out and the Dog calling in for safety. This is The System, but there may as well be none. We are lost on granite nothingness, now here, no where, a vector labyrinth of snowfields, giant boulders and vast rock faces that loom out of the mist. We can reset the map all we want but if we don't know our position..? The backup GPS on my iphone is not playing ball today, so a cheat is out. A little rain now and then, its getting cold and we're moving in ever decreasing circles.

With hindsight, I can tell you that the Port is set obliquely at an angle on the border ridge south of Palas. I would have at some point early on been only a few metres from the final approach, but it was concealed completely from me then by dense clag and its obsure angle. 7pm passes, forays down, then up to no avail. We retreat to the 2 cairns again, 8pm comes and goes. Shortly after, the cloud clears for a few seconds and the Dog correctly ID's two lakes far below us. I confirm them as the lakes on the Spanish side I walked last year, down from the Col de Arremoulit - the Ibones del Arriel.

8.10pm Second Mistake. We don't go down to the lakes. It would mean losing many hundreds of metres in exchange for a safe pitch. Why the hell wasn't I calling this in? I even remember thinking that. The Dog's ID was good, my decision making was not. Instead, we head off NE as instructed by our dutch guidebook on a vague bearing, steeply around a large snowfield with more loose scree underfoot in ever thickening cloud and drizzle. North, then East to compensate, but we're too high now. We reach a tiny climbers bivy chiseled out on a crumbling bluff just off a windswept ridge down from Palas itself. Again, we see what we want to see. This is the port?! No. There's no way down the other side, its not even a col or a saddle, let alone a gash in the rock. Darkness descending, weather deteriorating, 9.30pm. I wrestle with loosely formed options but its synapse soup, any thoughts I have are pickled in the clinging cloud.

9.40pm Third mistake. I decide to descend on the French side of the ridge, pack on. A small foray. The Dog is nervous, fair enough: potentially fatal errors are made in increments and he's wise enough to know this. Its awful going straight down on wet, loose rock. The next morning we see climbers going up this section roped up and and with protection, I went down with 15kg on my back, without. About half way down I realise I can't go up again, so its down or nothing. I really, really don't like the feel of nothing. The Dog is asking me what to do, but I don't have the words, I can't think, I am concentrating too hard on controlling hands, feet and fast rising fear. Stupid, they can't do this, I barely can. He calls it, thankfully, they stay up. I feel panic rising in my stomach, my legs are starting to go, my breathing is erratic, I am slipping into the early stages of shock and we barely have comms - the mountain takes all the treble from our voices, we only hear muffled bass. This is now, officially, out of our control.

I go down another 20 or 30ms. I don't know how but I don't fall. I see a kind of walkway of scree and rubble below at a horrible angle below, and a terrifying V in the ridge on the left, black fangs in the mist. I reach the sloping floor and make my way towards the V. This is definitely it, its the Port de Lavedan, its what we've been aiming for. NE was right but out by a degree or 2 at most - enough in the clag to ruin us. The Dog and I bellow instructions at each other, barely audible. They can't move, they are basically cragfast. I'm breathing hard and starting to shake. Body is not doing as instructed. Breathe deep, talk it down, its fine, nobody is hurt, you know where you are, you know where they are, you just don't know how to join them or what to do next. Bizarrely, I take my pack off and start to climb straight up the side of the Port! Almost instantly, I stop and realise that is insanity. I have both shelters, the single working lighter and alot of insulation - If I am separated from that, it means they have to come this way. What for? And what if we can't find it again? Dangerous. A few moments, a serious few words with myself. Don't fuck this up, this counts now, this is how people get hurt.

We have to stay up here tonight. Think. OK, there's no choice. I can't go back the way I came. I can probably go up, but they can't follow me back down again. I have to go round, it must be doable, its the way we were supposed to come. I know this but I'm resisting, there's something really intimidating about those fangs I don't want to be anywhere near on my own. But it has to be. Talk to Dog. ''I. COME. TO. YOU''. Wait. Again. Then the answer. ''O. KAY." Up and over the Port. There's a car sized boulder in the crevasse 10ms off the top which almost gets the better of me again. Breathing hard, I can taste the panic rising, sour bile. Control it, fear is the mindkiller. Make like a slithering reptile, stay glued to the rock as much as possible, still stumbling and falling. Hard with a backpack, harder still with half of someone else's kit attached. Then down, and around a snowfield rotting at its edge. Rock disappears high and hard into foul mist ahead. Vague voice directions from the Dog. A request from me for him to move a little west away from the ridge and show light, so I can see him beyond the overhang. I see it and start to climb. Treacherous, wet bag hanging from my shoulders, granite rounded, soaking wet. No. Grip.

About 15 minutes later I'm back and we're together. I'm at the edge of shock, but get warm and I'm good again. They have had time to work out a plan, they rig a fly over the crumbling granite wall of the bivy and make food, lots of it. I don't want to stay up here, there's a better spot to pitch a few metres back I know, but I'm in no position to make requests. Eat. If the weather holds we'll be OK, if not, who knows.

Then, something shifts. After food, suddenly and unexpectedly, the dense cloud lifts, swept away to the French side in seconds.

A sea of boulders was lit under cold blue-white moonlight, exposing the granite underworld where we came unstuck. And mountains forever, above, beyond and around us. Scale and proportion are completely unreadable, its as if a painting has been engraved on my retina now, for good. I've been up high before on a clear night, but not like this, not this high on guilt and adrenaline. I couldn't concentrate then - I felt too bad for my friends, but I'm glad they got the payoff in the end. I've come to appreciate it afterward. The Dog said it was 'a humbling that resets you to your core', but there are no words, really.

Why did the weather clear after we, I, had neglected to make all the proper decisions? No reason. We were lucky.

Clear means cold. We bivy, the Fish lying down shivering under a space blanket, the Dog and I sitting up in our bivybags, all layers on, the most uncomfortable night I have ever spent bar none, hard rock in soft places, cramp. At dawn we break camp and make coffee. The cloud clings to the French side, but all of Spain is exposed in the first orange rays of a new day, burning off fast. Are we glad to see it? That would be a yes.

Down the way I had come up the previous night, the Fish is mostly silent, brooding, cursing my name. We limp over the Port past climbers tooling up for Palas and down on a steep mess of rubble, downwards for an eternity, limbs sluggish with fatigue, post adrenaline. Its a wide eyed world, I am happy counting my blessings, but its an achingly long, tough descent for 3 tired and hapless walkers.

Once again, the guidebook steers us wrong, and we descend too far to the lake. The 1.50k shows little but a path we should have joined by now. By 10am we are dog tired of boulders and loose scree sapping every calorie, again not thinking clearly and liable for more mistakes if not extra careful. I call a stop for breakfast after the Dog warns me off a particularly steep option.

A little better, we climb up again, I lead a route over a vast granite knuckle but quickly lose sight of the others. Slow down over the crest, wait, blow whistle to signal. The path is ahead, we are out of the woods. The Dog catches up, wide eyed. He's heard 2 blasts on the whistle and panicked, not knowing that the universal signal for distress in the mountains is 6 in 1 minute. Ok, we are all still wired. Again, I curse my own preparations - assume nothing, not knowing is not a crime, not explaining is. I apologise, we confer and swap positions, his turn to take point.

After another hour we reach the Lac de Micoulaou, strip off, and dive in. Freezing but needed. A little kit washed, some more food. Stumble to Larribet, no faith in my directions now, everything questioned, but say nothing and get us home safe. Coffee and cake outside the Refuge. We'll stop near here tonight. Camp, drink some beer. Sleep. What a bloody shambles.

...............................................................

And there ends the tale. As you might infer, alot of the issues we had stemmed from bad preparation and a breakdown in communication. I'd never hiked in a group before, and wasn't clear about my role. This experience absolutely shaped how I approached the remainder of the HRP when walking with others - it was key. Here's my take home lessons from that night, as much for my own future reference as for anyone else:

Know your team, don't assume knowledge, skills or experience. Ask specific questions which pin down exactly where your team members are at if you haven't hiked with them before. Be ready to change plans if the walk is different to the talk.
Know your own skills and experience. Be honest about your strengths and weaknesses, and don't be bullied or acquiesce.
Accidents are often a compound of a number of tiny mistakes, one small risk leading to another bigger one, and so on. Check and balance each decision as its made. Hunger, thirst, emotions or tiredness can all get in the way of the walk. Check it, rectify it, move on.
You may have a right to put yourself in danger if you wish. You don't have the right to endanger others.
Probably the most important: Know when to bail, and always have a plan B. Bailing is not an admission of failure, bailing is admitting you'd like to keep hiking in the future.

(thanks to the Dog for the title of this post)

...............................................................

I walked the HRP for 2 great charities - the JMT and Soundmix. If you didn't donate yet, you can still do that, here Everyone who donates £10 or more gets a Trip Report bundle. The blog will not contain the full report. Donate, then send your details to davepowered(you know where)gmail(you know what)com and you'll get a thing, when its done. Thanks

Change

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:30:00 +0000

A day before I left for the Haute Route I saw a tweet for a part time job with the John Muir Trust, the environmental trust I raised money for alongside Soundmix. I applied sitting in a room surrounded by dried food, maps and batteries on a whim and a prayer - since I wasn't around for the interviews in the summer, it was academic.

Then, on my trip I heard from them. I dropped down from the tops to do 2 telephone interviews, and when I got back I went to Edinburgh to meet them. They offered me some work, and I'm going to take it. It doesn't pay much but its a start. It means moving to Edinburgh by the New Year.

This is a big shock to me, I didn't expect anything like this to happen. It means a massive change for both my girlfriend and I, but chances like this don't present themselves every day, and when they do, they are worth taking.

It'll mean being nearer the Scottish hills that I love and am eager to learn more about, and working for an organisation that is doing something radical and positive at a time when big money and small politics are running amok. It means living in a city in proportion, a city where I can climb a hill in the park and see the edges, and the sea.

I can't wait.

Things that changed on the HRP

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:21:00 +0000

I'd never walked 500 miles before, it was a new thing. And a few things changed on the way through. Here are some of them:

1. The will to continue, the will to finish. I didn't have much of a problem keeping going, the landscape keeps changing and you keep walking, its pretty simple. Some days its physically a struggle and some days you're on fire, mostly that had to do with food, or if any alcohol was consumed the night before (generally a bad idea, it slows you down, alot). Apart from the odd bummed out few hours here and there, carrying on was fine - everyday is different, you put one foot in front of the other, and you're doing something you love...whats the problem?

But finishing is different. I started out not thinking about the end. But you have to, eventually, it takes you over. In the west, I called the 900KM I walked 500Miles because it sounded less. At the top of Canigou, the last big mountain in the east, I texted my family: 'I can see the sea, I can see the end', and cried a bit behind my sunglasses. Andy, who ended up being a co-walker for most of that last stage, and I walked down in silence for the next hour, both needing the headspace. It was there that I realised just how big this trip was, how far I'd come and all the experience I'd packed into a relatively short space of time.

So, getting to the sea was ok physically, being in the walk mentally having seen the finish line was not. To do the thing to the bitter end, you have to be bloodyminded, a stubborn pain in the arse, a driven, foaming mouthed lunatic, because the days after Canigou were mentally difficult and the wild camps less inspiring. I understood in the last days just how important it was for me to get to the end - apparently, there was NO way I wasn't going all the way, save a serious injury. A few others dropped out or cherry picked stages, and listen, everyone walks their walk and their whole walk and whatever works for them...but for me that meant the whole thing - I was always out to thru-hike the HRP from beginning to end, with all the tall bits inbetween, and not crap out. At one point early on I was told I was too focused. Uh huh.

More confusing than this, is the urge to keep going. You want to complete the walk but you don't want it to end. Its a way of life. It makes total sense. Why stop? Besides, by then you're hooked on the endorphins. Both Andy and I talked about yo-yo'ing, walking back to the Atlantic before winter set in. We also started to slow down after Canigou, imperceptibly at first, stretching out the last days, before train bookings and work concerns got us back on pace.

But I didn't know any of this at the start. Realising you are that foaming mouthed fool on an errand is not an easy admission, because it means facing how important the walk is for you...but that's who it takes to get you to the finish. If you don't care, then you don't get there. By the time I got to the sea I had already arrived, it was almost a normal afternoon on the beach - swim, ice cream, beer. Almost.

2. Duration/distance. Moving through country consistently for a number of weeks is a whole new head space. On the Redoute de Lindus in the Basque country, I looked back over my measly 6 days of walking so far. As far as the eye could see I had walked, and there was more I couldn't, back to the sea at the start. I tracked back through days of mountains and valleys, blue hill after blue hill. I knew them all, their crests and folds, far more intimately than if I had traveled by any other means. It blew my mind just how far and how fast you can travel without hooves or wheels. I felt tuned in to other travelers who had seen this then as I saw it now, back down the centuries. We are built to do this, and we do it well, we are highly adapted all terrain transport vehicles for thought.

3. Physicality/momentum. I enjoyed being lean and strong, I even enjoyed getting that way. At school I was pretty useless at sport, I quit smoking only 9 months ago, but this trip showed me that some form of athleticism isn't just for other people, that I can do it too. Its a sort of reconciliation, and its a big deal for me - there is less divide between body and mind, and I grew to relish the daily physical challenges. All of this, crucially, joined me to the physical landscape I was moving through more than ever before. Bonded. And before this trip I didn't understand others need for speed whilst traveling - why do some choose to do this stuff fast? I'm still no runner, but the necessity sometimes to complete a section quickly meant I gained new respect for those who increase the speed - there is a rhythm and a grace that comes with walking at pace, that I now understand and even embrace.

4. Teamwork. You learn powerful things about yourself and your co walkers doing something like this. All the front is stripped away very fast, sometimes its not for the faint hearted. A good team uses all it has in terms of individual strengths without chest beating, and compensates for it's individuals natural weaknesses whilst never letting any of the individuals give any less than 100%. Being in a team isn't an excuse for poor performance, its an opportunity to learn and excel in great company. None of us are perfect, but its about attitude. And balance. I want to know my co walkers are solid and have my back, because I do have theirs. Most of all I want to know they are trying. If I know these things, I'll go to the ends of the earth. I want to walk with people like that, because it makes me better, and because it matters for our safety. Early on I dropped the ball, I failed to make responsible decisions when others were relying on me because of bad weather and a lack of experience on their part. I can't answer for them, but my part in that bit hard, and I won't forget it.

5. The real meaning of Anarchy. Learning to be ever more responsible for food, water, hygiene, shelter and our direction of travel everyday, day in and week out. No one is going to bail me out, I wouldn't want that anyway, and so I became as close to self reliant as its possible to be whilst not hunting. When I made the wrong decision, the consequences were there, right in front of me, staring me down. If I didn't pack enough water because I wasn't paying attention, I got thirsty. It was up to me and my co-walkers, and the honesty of these equations was simple, beautiful and totally refreshing - the consequences weren't hidden and I wasn't looking for others to blame. As was said often - 'It is what it is'. This is as good a definition of true anarchy as I can think of - not chaos or an absence of order, as sold to us by politicians and the paranoid, but an owning of real and tangible rules for individual engagement in the world.

6. Zen Troubleshooting. I am at peace, and with peace comes perspective. After a few weeks and a few mishaps, in times of decision or crisis I became calm, evaluated the variables and chose the best option from those available. I developed the skill of a restful mind, albeit one troubled by less frequent dysfunctional human interaction as is often the case in the city. I felt connected and not separate from the world, made of the same elements, and that helped me solve the puzzles of the walk effectively, finding solutions to potential issues be they navigation, repair or supply. I appreciated a feeling of deep space, which was only possible because of total immersion, over many weeks, in both walking and landscape. The world is ours if we own up to it and act respectfully, there is nothing to fear at all.

7. Navigation. There is the data, and then there is the interpretation of data. Most of all there is a difference between the on the ground facts and what you might want to see in a clinch. Knowing this helps me backtrack to the realities of map, ground, bearing, and mitigating factors such as fatigue, food/water status, group dynamic and weather. I learned over time to use all the tools at my disposal (apart from GPS, which was used as a last resort twice) and read between the lines...which was needed. As documented by others, the Joosten guide has some quite serious issues, which I'll aim to correct for others doing this walk in the future by producing a PDF documenting the hot spots. The maps are OK but not to OS standard by any means - often the orientation of paths or even whole mountains is off by as much as 40 degrees, contour lines are missing, and many times paths are not marked at all. In the east there is more iron, which can mess with your compass needle. I'm still far from being the world's most technical navigator, and there is room for improvement always, but by the last few weeks I barely used the guide at all, just stopping to make my own notes for others and for comparisons to the mapping. I got the feel of how things would 'go' and weighed up all my data to make better decisions. A good altimeter helped with this too.

7. My understanding of 'wilderness'. I intend to look at this in more detail in other posts, and there's alot to be said about this word which is used too often and too lazily. I still don't think wilderness need mean an absence of people, as many seem to suggest, but it does need to contain wild-life - and that means at least on equal terms with people, and it might often mean in preference to people. The Pyrenees are sometimes not wilderness, ditto many of the UK's national parks - often they are semi barren deserts that have had their wild-life largely exterminated through centuries of hunting, mining, damming, grazing and deforestation - resource exploitation. It doesn't mean these places aren't sometimes beautiful, but I want to be more honest about my use of the word. We go to 'play' in these places, and call the emptiness there wilderness. We shouldn't confuse wilderness with a feeling of wildness - a strangeness, a feeling that this is an alien or inhospitable place. In some cases, maybe what we are feeling is deadness! On the treeline at 2700ms can feel wild, and may be so if not interfered with...but if surrounded by roads, agriculture, cattle, rubbish and other peoples turds it tends not to be, because those things destroy habitat and habitat is needed for the survival of living things. Real wilderness below 2700ms in the Pyrenees is not empty, sterile grazing land, it is really busy! - chock full of buzzing, eating, drinking, transforming and frenetic life, a rounded ecosystem, a diversity that boggles the brain. When I witnessed that on the HRP, it was amazingly, wonderfully noisy. Other times, I saw abuses which broke my heart. Lastly, I saw things which gave me hope, tell tale signs that nature is resilient and can come back from the brink or coexist, despite our best efforts at Scorched Earth. If the HRP has one thing over any other walk in Europe, its variety - from shore to farmland to glacier to rock and all the way back again.

These are just some of the lessons. More to come.

Mountain people, walking people - a love story (part ii)

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:16:00 +0000

Self portrait - Estany Negre, lake of many flies and an angry deer

Tim, has your back - Palas


Mark, understandably pensive after the mountain bit back - Palas

Nic and Andy, a good day in good company - Valle Pleasance

Sam, HRP walker and gentleman - Refuge de Viados

Tanya, goddess of rock - Valle de Remune

Sarah, jedi master long distance walker - Estany de Llavera

Thomas and friends, after a wild camp epiphany - Refuge de Certascan

Humphrey and friend, the Dude Abides - Pla de Boet

Matt, HRP walker and ultralight traveller - Coma Pedrosa

Yann, 21st century shepherd, knows what time it is - road approach, Canigou

Andy, HRP thru hiker, navigates natures wonders - beech forest near journeys end

And to all the others I met but didn't manage a photo, including Jay & Ci Ci, Chris & Jan, Jean-Michelle, Cederic, Lex, and Julian, bon voyage and thanks.

I walked the HRP for 2 great charities - the JMT and Soundmix. If you didn't donate yet, you can still do that, here Everyone who donates £10 or more gets a Trip Report bundle. The blog will not contain the full report. Donate, then send your details to davepowered(you know where)gmail(you know what) com and you'll get a report when its done. Thanks

Le tramp, c'est fini

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 21:29:00 +0000

Arrived on 2nd September 2011 at 3pm, in the small resort town of Banyuls Sur Mer on the Mediterranean sea, 64 days and 900kms from the start of the Haute Route Pyrenees, and walked into the sea. It's been an epic trip, a voyage of discovery, a hugely enjoyable learning curve, and a good old fashioned adventure - the stuff of life.

To those that have donated, thanks so much for taking an interest and supporting the walk- it has
made a difference to the walkers and will make a difference to both Soundmix and the JMT. If you've yet to donate, there is still time. The page remains open; http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/davidlintern
And if you've been holding out to see if I would complete the challenge, now's the time to throw a few pennies into the hat for 2 fantastic organisations!

Your generosity will be rewarded. For all those who donate 10£ or over, there will be a PDF report, including a full gear review, photos and clarifications to the existing English language guide (the
Cicerone/Joosten book) relevant to those who might want to explore this fantastic area on foot. If this is of interest email me at davepowered at gmail.com with your name and donation date/amount.
Please put 'hrp report' in the subject heading. Some have already expressed an interest in this, but please do make sure I have your email so I can furnish you with the thing when it's done.

Now on the train home. Gravity. What goes up, must come down. The Pyrenees are ace, and walking a long distance walk is something else. Like the man said, 'only connect'.

Stage 5 - thru hiking

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 18:10:00 +0000

After a while you take what you can get. In our case that was a flat
pitch next to a ski run. It wasn't our finest hour but there was a
fire circle and a good wood supply. Overnight we had the first frost
and sub zero temperatures, a restless night for walkers equipped for
summer.
True to form, the mountains change again, after the prayer flags at
the col de coume d'Agnel. The horizon opens ever wider and the tops
expose the collisions of plates and upshift that created the range.
Around the summit of Carlit, a huge desert of alpine tundra grows,
dotted with lakes, deer and dams. The enormous and exposed Noarre
ridge challenges with biting gusts and intimidating shale and scree
contours, a visceral high line drawn up in the land. On the approach
to Canigou (summit pictured), the last great peak of the oriental
Pyrenees, sunset silhouetted open vistas speak of the green
Mediterranean plains ahead, and the end of this crossing. There are
also more day trippers and out of season ski resorts, as well as
dolmens and henges, evidence of lives past lived and previous attempts
to understand our environment.
Andy and I met in Lescun, and met up again in the valle d'eyne. He is
a true lover of nature, and of science, and this is his first long
distance walk too. We seem to walk well together, keep good pace. We
wend our way towards the sea again, not wanting the walk to end, but
compelled to keep walking. We are stubborn, driven, drawn on. We are
at home.
http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/davidlintern
Sent from Dave's mobile

Stage 4 - the wild red mountains of Catalonia

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:33:00 +0000

Tanya, aka the gecko (so named because of her ability to stick to
rock, the woman should be a climber, really) left, sadly, and Thomas
arrived at Salardu, where pizza, ice cream, hot showers and real beds
were consumed. It was nice, and expensive, and I was glad to move on.

Afterwards, my new walking companion and I move through simmering
plains and dusty paths to lake after lake, not shared with vultures or
marmots as in France, but now with deer and horses. The rock is
increasingly laden with iron and the granite is almost deco, smoothed
and rounded by glacial erosion - these are old hills. The sheer scale
and drama of the 3000m + tops around Aneto is gone, replaced with
something quieter, hotter, more ancient and more melancholy.

The paths that exist are sometimes well marked, but often the route
takes us through dense and tangled woodland on steep and stifling
contours, scrambles and brambles, old trading roads or up the sides of
mountains with no path at all. As always, the routes near trailheads
are well frequented, though it is not crowded, and it is possible to
walk for a day without seeing anyone.

Since its now August, the thunderstorms are at least more regular:
twice a day, mid afternoon on. The wind makes a terrible whooshing
sound just before a storm hits. After the storms, we find seem to
find one great wild camp after another, often cooking over wood
collected in the valleys before the rain, and pitched by still or
flowing water.

Walking and being in the open all the time is now as normal as
breathing, it's what I do each day. I have stood on the very highest
mountains in Catalonia on my own at dusk with a full heart. I am
fitter than I have ever been in my life, and grateful for it. I am a
lucky man, and these are days to be lucky.

There are around 15 days left before the med.

http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/davidlintern

Why We Walk

noreply@blogger.com (David L) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:50:00 +0000

I wrote the lions share of this last year whilst I was walking a section of the HRP the first time and its been sitting in the draft pile ever since. Its scheduled to publish on my birthday, whilst I'm somewhere in Andorra. Its what I think and where I'm at so far, heart on sleeve - you work out if it makes any sense.

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Carl Sagan said 'we are made of star stuff', and that 'we are the way the cosmos can know itself', and I find myself in agreement. I walk not to find myself, but to find the world. I am not running away, I am running towards. If I can begin to know the world, I might stand a chance of knowing myself, although the former is more interesting than the latter. If I am up here, away from mankind's petty concerns and self importance, then I can start to see a bigger picture. I gain ground to gain perspective. Or, so I think.

I believe that aside from equipping and planning in order to stay safe, it's not our journey. We do not own it, we can only share it, jump into the tide, vibrate in sympathy with the land - I am just joining the dots, making a tiny electrical connection each time I place a foot, earthing myself, and maybe, possibly, hopefully, connecting to... who honestly knows what, but just something much bigger than me. When your out that's most things - trees, rocks, rivers, weather. Now, hold on a minute. Just in case you're wondering, I'm not part of any lunatic fringe religion. My own view is that G*d doesn't approve of religion, not one bit of it - so no, I'm with this guy:

Through hiking is hard work: even lighter weight is heavy. Food and water and shelter are the things necessary to life: through hiking reminds you what is minimum and what is excess, every step of the way. Any weight we do carry reminds us there is a Price to pay, in a world where rights and priveleges are confused and costs and consequences not fully understood. To be here, to fully engage with our true nature, costs. It can be as simple as counting calories, and it can mean sacrificing some comfort. We are reminded of our responsibilities, to look after ourselves and our co-walkers, and with any luck to look after our surroundings. So, I am friends with the mountains, and if they are implacable back, whats a few kilos amongst friends? Some might call it unconditional love. But, don't ever take it for granted.

At some point, we've all seen or been limping walkers who bind knees and rub ointments into aching joints. Why bother? These and much bigger struggles are often lauded as human achievement, a battle of wills, the fighting spirit. Really? Sounds like vanity to me. Or else we discuss our experiences in the hushed and reverent tones of an externalised mystical experience: nature did this to me, I was rendered helpless by a power beyond me, passified by the message - slow down and take stock. It is a powerful message - out here, we aren't at the centre of things for a change. And its certainly physical as well - endorphins are released, and bodily exercise becomes and allows a meditation beyond the daily grind. I use an electrical metaphor - the earthing of body to ground is vital to comprehension of my place in the scheme of things. Maybe it works because of this balance between active and passive, between doing (the walk) and being (in the place). But, these are all ways of describing the thing, but they are not the thing itself - trying to describe it just begs more questions. And, we keep going back for more, locked in for tiny but vital reminders. Strange. Maybe all I can safely say is that I'm a dumb vessel, a cup of constantly shifting comprehension, a blinking, half baked and completely analogue struggle to get it. Whatever it is.

But, I'd like to think Sagan was right. On a good day, I see walking as a vehicle for consciousness raising, and walkers as modern day, secular pilgrims - and if it sounds grand, it's because it is, but definitely not because we are necessarily grand as individuals. Its odd that we enjoy it, and it hurts, but we do it anyway. Barthes calls this Jouissance - pleasure and pain, (or certainly some discomfort) are somehow linked in bliss, the occasional glimpses of the sublime when on the mountain. Walking is work, but we like to work, we are drawn to it. We walk for peace and we walk for piece of mind, we walk to understand, we walk to dream and for flashes of early light and unexpected revelation, and to be squashed flat and atomised by glimpses of prehistory in the trees and rivers, rocks and stars. We also walk to be challenged and to be scared and to be fouled by the weather and to be hungry, thirsty, angry and dog tired. We walk to become more fully aware of being alive, to be present in the present, and to stand under. We walk for the experience, because experience teaches us. Humans love to learn, its almost the definition of the species. I don't know a single person who walks who doesn't have these reasons at heart, deep down. Now that, my friends, is grand.

Some I imagine are not going to be too comfortable with this kind of talk, because it sounds like hippie claptrap or a g*dtrick. But its a very human urge, and a scientific urge, to inquire and to do it with joy. We call it creativity.

Sagan, Feynman and Feyerabend (who famously said 'anything goes') were open and honest about leaps of faith and the role of dreaming in science. As was Einstein (who famously said lots of stuff, including 'logic will take you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere'). If you look at 'Cosmos', Sagan's series from the 1970's, now, it looks and sounds like a hippie manifesto - he's so Utopian (nice corduroy jacket too). Good science is climbing the un-scalable peak, getting lost in the storm, a striving to discover the unknown in inhospitable conditions - all about raising consciousness and reaching for the skies beyond reason. If you still doubt that Science is not just cold hard fact but equally inspiration and creativity, where does the phrase "Eureka!" come from? But maybe I am too dewy eyed about these titans of exploration - Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project, developing the atomic bomb. Science, focused hard on politics and war. Not objective. Partisan.

Science is a human endeavour and therefore fallible. It makes bold guesses, and then tries to prove them (sounds like my map reading). Often it gets things hopelessly wrong and is as far away from objectivity as any other form of knowledge - before you start spluttering with indignation, just read a little Karl Popper and then add some Thomas Kuhn to see how politics and academia get in the way of 'truth' in science. Knowledge is as often suppressed by Power as encouraged, but Power always plays a role. Science itself is a political institution too, that's why there's more money spent on developing new dyes for bad meat than on R&D for tropical diseases. We don't know, what we don't know.

All the best parts of human endeavour are based on exploration and adventure - good science is an art, and good walking is both. The will to forward momentum is the will to learn, to inquire and to do it with joy. As we walk, we map out our own dreams and desires internally, like land artists or Pagan architects. The walk is work and we love to work, locked into an effort to comprehend. Its not out there beyond the senses though, we are part of it. This neither proves or disproves the existence of G*d, but it does demonstrate an innate creativity, a reflex action in the species - but I don't mind, call it what you want! All I know is we separate art/science/faith/stillness/action at our peril...and we all spend way too much time arguing over crumbs, when we could be designing better rainbows together.

But that's us, its not the hills. The hills don't have a feeling about it either way. They will still be here - long after we've finished being outraged with each others stupidity and accidentally pushed the wrong button - slowly turning to scree, then exploding into new forms from under the sea. And the Pyrenees? A classroom...and a garden of Eden, incredibly diverse in flora and fauna...but not mine, either way. Out here, nature is at hand, and all my petty judgments, goals and comforts, mental and physical, are of no consequence. Out here, its the lack of choice that is liberating - there is no option but to be a worthy guest. Mountain travel demands selflessness, complete respect and a little cardiovascular sacrifice - really, it requires silence to fully appreciate whats happening, and its a blessed relief when I get there. That is journey's end, for me and for now.

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