OK, I accept it. It’s not the guidebook or the trail. It’s us. We are old and feeble. Let’s face it, Pam is almost 55 (I’m only 53). Jessica is way past half way; she’s doing the trail and pretty much on schedule. This just proves the point that we were right to take off when we did. If we had waited any longer, we wouldn’t be able to do this. As it is, we’ve probably lost Corsica for this year. We’ll pick up another trail in England to get some more miles.
The storm wasn’t that bad. I fell asleep before it was over. After it stopped raining, I woke back up to visit the outdoors again while it was still light. I vaguely remember another visit when the stars were bright. Other than that, I slept very peacefully as long as Pam didn’t have to change positions. I think she intentionally kicks to make sure I’m awake.
We were awoke by hikers already heading up to Col de la Madamete. We figured we had about 2600′ to still go so we got up and hit the trail as soon as we ate and got packed up.
The valley we walked up was simply amazing. It wasn’t a steep climb, but a gentle incline up to where the valley narrowed to a point you had to climb just a little to get up to the next plateau. When you got up, you were in the mouth of another valley. You would walk up it until in narrowed and you had to climb up to…another valley. We did this about three times until we got to Cabane d’Aygues at about 6500′.
Here’s another reason to not like the writer of the guidebook. He said this was a place suitable for emergency use–this was camping central in the mountains. We had been passed by people all day thinking they were heading to the pass when they were probably heading here. There were several tents set up with a nice mountain lake behind the shelter. People were swimming in the lake and climbing trails in every direction–and this was a Monday. There must have been 50 people of all ages here.
After soaking our feet, hating to pass up a nice lake, we continued our climb up to the pass. We still had a little over a thousand feet to climb. Maybe we are getting a little stronger, because the hike didn’t seem too terrible today. Granted, we move slower than anyone else on the trail (even a two year old passed us today, but the little brat didn’t even have a pack on).
People were passing us, but not burying us in their dust like before. We actually caught up with and passed people who passed us. But then they’d pass us again and show us the truth. As we climbed, we started seeing more lakes. There must have been 8 more lakes before we made the pass. We didn’t soak our feet in any of them, but we did take time for a Snickers break.
After the pass, there were more lakes. We could see brown patches in the rocks that must normally be snow packs. Since we did make the pass in a reasonable amount of time (less than double the quoted times in the book) we decided to reward ourselves with another foot soaking (actually, it was mandatory to keep us going).
We only dropped about 1000′ from the pass and we decided we were done for the day. We found a nice bivouac area below a dam and decided to call it a day. We set up camp, filtered water, cooked supper, and finished the day with meds to keep us going another day.
