Wow. Just wow. This was probably our favorite day of hiking so far. Usually, you encounter something new on the GR10 and it gets beaten to death so that you are glad when it’s finally over. Not the case today.
Let’s back up. We did have mice last night, but they couldn’t get to any of our stuff hanging from the ceiling. What they we chewing on, we didn’t care about. It did keep me awake but Pam snored blissfully away even though she will deny it. One of the times I went outside, I heard a new strange animal noise that I couldn’t identify or wish to investigate because it sounded BIG.
We got up and had breakfast with Casper “on the veranda” and watched the sunrise over the mountain. We didn’t have much because we were hoping we could get some food at the restaurant that was less than a mile away that we were aiming for yesterday before the storms pinned us down. (Note to self: see if I can find a backpack for Pam with built in blue tooth surround speakers. Every time she drops too far behind or is going to slow, I can push some thunderstorm sounds her way to get her moving fast.)
There are a few events that stand out when you are hiking long trails. We will make a list of our highlights as we get closer to the end, but I’m talking like unexpectedly running into Axel & Heike in Gabas, having Suzy invite us into her home for the night, and a great breakfast like we had today. It wasn’t really much, but we are low on food, haven’t eaten enough calories for the last few days, and were very hungry. This meal hyped us up (maybe it was all the caffeine and sugar).
Because we broke today’s itinerary up and did a large part of the climbing yesterday, we only had 3000′ of rise and 1700′ of decline over 9.5 miles–practically an entire day of level hiking. We spent almost all day above 6000′ and almost half of that above 7000′. We are staying in a refuge just a little below 7000′ tonight.
It was a day of a few hundred feet up, a couple hundred feet down with amazing, postcard views in every direction. We ran into Casper again after breakfast. Today is going to be his last day hiking because he needs to hitch home to take care of his mother after her knee surgery and then he’s flying to Milan before school starts back up in late September. It was great hiking with someone his age. Maybe we can get Sam out for a bit next year when we’re doing the Appalachian Trail.
We got up to a high plateau just shy of 7500′ and we were all alone. Not a soul in sight in any direction. By the time we had a little snack, more than a dozen people had gathered at the spot we had stopped. There were 6 younger people from Paris as well as Casper coming up to catch us one more time to say goodbye.
We were the first to leave the group because we were a little afraid of getting caught in another thunderstorm. We were only about 2.5 miles from the refuge and we thought we’d be there in an hour or two at most. The entire hike from that point was one thrill after another. We hiked along a knife’s edge between several valleys that all converged in this area. It was a steep enough drop off either side to give you the illusion of instant death if you fell, but in reality, it would just be a slow, lingering death while you lied broken into multiple pieces praying for the reaper to come for you.
As Pam picked up some cheese off the ground that had fallen out of her sandwich and blew on it before popping it in her mouth, it occurred to me that we do things a little differently on the trail than we do back home. In one gite, we knocked some potatoes on to the floor. I picked them up and put them on the edge of the plate and then, eventually ate them. I didn’t blow on them because I didn’t want to draw attention that they had been on the floor (the extra grit wasn’t that bad). I’ve even eaten M&Ms out of a lake to keep fish from getting them (but even in civilization, M&Ms don’t even have a time limit, so this is no big deal).
When we arrived at the refuge, we dropped all of our stuff in the outer room and came in to check about beds. The people we had met from Paris had already told us there was plenty of room and the food was great so we knew what to expect. Walking into the dining area, we saw the little girls of the family we have been leap frogging for the last 3 days. They smiled at us and then we saw their parents sitting by the fireplace. Across from them was Patrick and Anne from Paris that we had met in Refuge de Bassies 6 days ago.
Unlike the Camino, where we had a “family” of people we hiked with for the entire month, along the GR10, we get multiple smaller families that keep rotating out. We talked with everyone for a bit before we sat down for a beer (or two, for me–I take after my nieces, Jill and Jennifer).
