The force of tectonic plates crashing into each other at the speed of deep time, rounded out by several thousand years of grinding glaciers, created not only the Pyrénéen chain but the great gash valleys that run up to its wall. From Luz Saint Sauveur, one winding gouge abruptly ends at the Cirque de Gavarnie, a majestic amphitheatre of granite and limestone layers that buckle and fold around each other.
I am returning to this happy place, its familiar grooves and peaks, largely because I haven’t had time to plot out and prepare a new route this year. But then mountains are like that Zen river no one ever steps in twice. Turn left instead of right, go up a little higher, at a different time of day, with different weather, and it’s somewhere you’ve never been before. By the time I’m at the base of the Cirque’s largest cascade, with dozens of other walkers, thunder is repeating itself rapid fire, echoing around the concave wall, followed immediately by lightening. Then it’s a race, storm versus human, and we run, in hiking boots, to the nearest shelter as wind, heavy rain then hail arrives.
This Cirque, at this moment in time, is a landscape I’ve never met before: dark and moody and crashing turbulence overhead. A few hardy souls continue to go forward but I wait it out with a large hot chocolate. In an hour it’s over and I wander down, slightly damp, through humid forest and pasture, the river, well beyond Zen reflection, now a torrent to my left.
The rest of the week is unsettled, skirting squalls and thunder, and requiring the additional effort of on and off and on and off again rain jacket. But the clouds bring light and shadow into the valley, and rise and fall over the Cirque so that its outline shifts each day. When it clears a little I decide I should have a crack at Pic du Péméne, le petit if not le grand summit. It is the usual sharp incline from valley floor to estive plateau and then long lacets up to a ridge, a drop down the other side to skirt the small pic and rise to the ridge again, this time facing a steep rocky bulge to the top.
I stare at it, decide against it as it’s hard to see where the path goes and if there is any scrambling or severe drop offs, and have a picnic instead as vultures and eagles soar past at the same level. I walk back to the foot of the bulge once more, without backpack and poles to see if lightness helps, but still decide against it. I have figured out that my fear is not so much the drop off but getting half-way up and not being able to get down again, which would be excruciatingly embarrassing.
But then, as always, someone appears, running up (really, running!); a local out for a stretch who has the advantage of growing up in this magical kingdom. I follow his lead, crawling up for the first few metres safe in the knowledge that he’s too far ahead to see me, but then eventually talking myself into standing. Catching up with him at the penultimate cairn, I decline the last 50 metres as the short crest ends in a sharp scramble with jelly leg inducing exposure. The view is the same.
Before he disappeared down the mountain my guide pointed across the valley to a notch in the skyline above the Cirque and recommended I walk up there. I thought I had misunderstood as the Cirque is 1500m (ish) at its highest, and from where we were standing, very much the vertical wall. But on the map this notch has a name, Brèche de Roland. It is legendary as a 100m high ‘door’ between France and Spain that can be accessed behind the Cirque following the contours of classic mountain terrain: long lacets through steep estives, then plateau, shorter lacets over steep rocky trails, plateau, then even shorter lacets across steeper scree shoved to the side by thawing torrents. Throw in fording a few gushing glacial streams powering their way down to the valley floor and it’s a fun day out.
Initially following the lead of other hikers was a bad idea as it turned out they were 20-somethings who had been raised by Isards. I eventually found my own way following cairns, more or less, and after four hours, crossing a final ridge, the world as I had known it was now inverted: above the height of the main cascade on the other side of the Cirque; above the clouds that rolled up the valley; looking down on minute others looking up from where I’d been two days before in a storm. The upper layers of the Cirque, the tucks and folds of ancient rock, were in full view. An elegant refuge sat in an impossible position hanging onto the mountain side at the base of a steep moraine mass that people ascended and descended up to the brèche, to and from Spain. It is beyond words, beyond spectacular.
Despite the sense of deep time such places generate, at the scale of the human I only had 30 minutes to linger with rain predicted for 2pm. I asked the refuge guardian how difficult the descent straight down into the Cirque was and his response was pragmatic: ‘there is an immediate drop off the other side which you have to climb down and if you slip you’ll die’. So I’ll be going back the way I came then! Even with the best of maps, the unfamiliar is always a challenge; a metaphor, if you want to stretch it, for much of human angst.
Returning to the recently familiar but now in reverse, the boulders, roaring streams, steep moraine and lacets must be approached differently with gravity pulling downwards into clouds and out again. I disappear and am thankful for my GPS that continues to ping out a route. However, the predicted thunderstorm doesn’t appear apart from a few drops and one desultory rumble and I emerged into Plateau de Bellevue above the village in warm sunshine.
After the usual routine of washing me and clothes I wander up to the world’s most beautiful bar, facing the Cirque by the stream, just outside the village, for tea and tarte de myrtille. Slowly all the walkers and riverside sitters thin out and dissipate as clouds thicken and time approaches evening. I sit and ponder nothing for an hour or two. It's a strange pastime, to hike to the top of things, sit for 30 minutes or so and then hike back down again. I notice the difference between through-hiking, when you need to get somewhere as justification for the effort, and up and back for no reason other than seeing something. In the meantime, the cloud finally comes down completely, and the Cirque, and pondering minds, begin to sleep.
Familiarity can of course be a very useful thing, particularly when not carrying a map. Having already walked the section from Gavarnie to Refuge Baysellance three years before, a section that is basically the walkers equivalent of an A Road, there were some vague landmarks imprinted in memory … a statue of Mary, a refuge … that gave a general sense of confidence I was walking in the right direction until hitting the familiar red and white balisage of the GR10. The walk along the valley and upwards was as beautiful as I remembered it: early morning cloud eventually cleared from the contours of a valley; reaching Barrage Ossoue and its familiar river plateau; and the knackering long lacets and rocky corniches with precipitous drops into valleys below.
But then, passing the familiar grottos carved into the hillside, with the refuge almost in sight, for some inexplicable reason other than just tiredness, I missed the clearly signed intersection and started following unfamiliar cairns towards the Vignemale glacier. Not seeing anyone behind me still didn’t register a warning and instead I dug in deeper until an additional hour of faffing about on scree slopes finally got me backtracking to the right turning. Arriving late at the refuge, tea and chocolate cake were required to ease the pain and indignity of stupidity but there was still enough light left to watch groups going up and down Petite Vignemale before sunset.
As usual, the refuge was rammed (it’s one of the last Saturdays of the season) and a wall of noise. Two young women sit next to me and start teaching the group of older men in the corner how to play ‘pick up sticks’. Two Spanish on the other side play chess. There are card games, chatter, beer, coffee, beer. I knit socks. Dinner is in two shifts and I’m at a table of mostly Spanish who politely chat in English for my benefit.
In the morning the wind is cold and strong and I worry about the Spanish who are climbing Vignemale today. Walking with my back to her north face feels a bit rude, but I am on unfamiliar trail again, over a boulder field towards col d’Arraille, well in sight at 2583m. Boulder fields require care, intense concentration, and ideally long legs, to avoid turning an ankle or sliding with loose rock into a ravine. The stream of narrative in the head has to quieten for a few hours and focus: three points on the ground, testing for movement, transfer weight, three points on the ground, and so it goes downwards over rocks, moraine, and lacets, lacets, lacets. Marmots occasionally startle me but they are fat and lazy from summer grazing and can’t be arsed doing any more than peeping a few times and loping away.
With my GPS strap broken, time was tucked away in a pocket and no longer readily accessible, but reaching Refuge d’Estom, beautifully positioned next to a lac at the foot of Pic de la Sède, I know I’m hungry and an omelette is inhaled along with the last of the cheese. Time then stretched out the walk down this final gash valley to Cauteret, with its racing cascades and soft forest; the sun roasting trail, becoming path becoming road, and the now familiar routine for finishing in a happy place: hotel, washing, a spa treatment at the Thermes, a glass of rosé, and reflection on having so little time despite the evidence of millions of years around me.
(Gavarnie to Cauteret, September 2022)
