Pyrenees High Route section hike: Day 3
Great start to the day with a nice walk to a reservoir and then up to a café. A fairly nice café as well with a view of the Pyrenees with the clouds boiling up around them. There was supposed to be a shop there as well but they had moved so we had to backtrack a bit to fill up on supplies.
Afterwards we followed the Pyrenees High Route towards the first of our summits. Stunning, but also where things started to go wrong.
Firstly Angelynn tripped and fell, saving herself but scratching her iPhone. Then she dropped it smashing the screen. That cost, or will cost, roughly €200 to repair. Not a good idea to walk while looking at an iPhone.
This also got me worried about her balance. Being pregnant, of course, stuffs up your balance because there are bits of you in places where there weren't before. I spent the time after that seeing if she wanted to take a bad weather route as there were some challenging parts in the crossing. It turned out I shouldn't have bothered as it was me that was the problem. I should have taken the bad weather route.
It started on the way up a steep paddock tilted on around a fourty degree angle. As we got higher and higher the route moved to one corner and then thinned and thinned again. At this point I rediscovered vertigo and then as the route got more and more challenging fear. By the time Angelynn decided we had gone the wrong way I was in partial freak out mode clinging to a rock face above a large drop. It turned out we had missed the turn off to a scree slope and were sort of semi rock climbing.
I clung my way back to where we should have dropped down a steep slope. Looked over the edge and decided that it was a better survival strategy to go backwards along what I knew than forward down into the scree. I had had enough. I can deal with heights by not looking at them to a point but I was a long way over that point.
The journey back was a lot quicker that the journey up and afterward we dropped down onto the GR 12 to circuit the mountain that way. On the way we also met a couple of Polish guys going up so at least we were able to point them at the turn off we had missed.
As we circled around I also got to look up and watch them go through the pass we had and take some photos in case we ever catch up to them. It made me feel slightly better that they seemed to be taking it very carefully as well.
Our next problem turned out to be water. It seems it has been dryer than usual up here and there aren't as many water sources. For some reason we didn't fill up at every chance we got and then there weren't any more chances. Everything was dry.
Eventually we made camp on a ridge with a spectacular view, got water out of a farm reservoir, treated it, boiled it, and treated it again and as I write this we are lying in a tent being beaten by the wind. Nice sunset though.
