Col d’Ursua to Col d’Berdaritz
Distance Forward – 24.5km
This morning, my hiking partner said she was feeling worse than ever! She has been hard at work fighting off a nasty throat bug, and today it came back in full force. Not something you would wish on anyone three days into a hard walk through the wilderness.
Nevertheless, she is a real trooper and we have already made 10km as I write this. After a long uphill through pastures and forest land, we reached the Col Bagacheta.
We have been out of water since about 9am, so I was elated when I saw a big bathtub full of water just below the Col! I ran down and found the source of the spring that filled the tub. Ahhh, fresh, ice cold mountain water, straight from the top. There’s nothing like it.
I took the opportunity of having this pristine spring water to make a perfect cup of coffee, which I had foregone this morning due to not having enough water.
After that, we had a pleasant ridge walk down to the hamlet of Azpulcueta.
Then, onto the town of Arizkun, where we retrieved some more water out of a public well next to a stone arc bridge.
We stopped here to have lunch, but everything in the town seemed abandoned (as often happens as a daily siesta from 12-3pm in Spanish towns), so we settled on some snacks and soft drinks from a little convenience store/bar/restaurant.
Everything about the architecture and style of the building here in the Basque region is so picturesque! White plaster walls, lined and framed with old cedar wood and sandstone, shutters on all the windows, little balconies and flowers and stone walls lining every street and pathway. Every detail of every building seems artfully designed and maintained in immaculate condition. If it weren’t for the power lines and cars on the road, I would swear I had fallen back in time a millinia or two.
We decided to shoot for Aldudes as a goal today, to end our day with a nice hot meal and a bed to sleep in. That meant we had another 15km to go over the big hill called Burga (872m)! We set out at 3pm as the sun was in full force. Luckily, we had the cover of trees for much of the way, keeping us shaded and only slightly hot.
A lady passed us with a pack of three dogs, which looked like good shepherds. Everything out here relates to farming in some way or another, as that is the economic engine of all these fertile areas near the coast. I have to admit, the constantly dongling bells around the necks of every horse, sheep, and cow gets a little old after about a day. Can’t they figure out a better way to keep track of animals? Not to mention, the flies are horrendous in the lowland pastures. They won’t stop bugging me as I’m draggin’ up the uphill stretches.
And there’s the fact that factory livestock farming has possibly the highest negative impact for the environment, due to the clearcutting of pastures to make hay, the millions of miles of barbed wire fences cutting off migration passages, and the nitrogen runoff from vast herds of animals which go on to pollute the rivers with suffocating blooms of algae. Let the rivers run clear and pure, the way they were meant to, damnit.
And then there are people worried about the “impact” that backpackers have on the landscape. Do they not see the impact of having millions of cows trampling the countryside, eating everything in sight, creating horrible hordes of flies, constantly clearcutting more trees for more space to feed a ballooning population?
Yeah. Don’t try and say I’m having an “impact” by walking through the woods and camping here or there. The impact has already been made.
How can you help? One idea is to substitute local vegetables for meat on occasion, or at least buy meat with less impact. Generally, on a scale of how good different protein sources are for the environment:
- beef is about 1/5 most negative environmentally,
- pork and bacon 2/5,
- chicken 3/5,
- fish 4/5, and
- vegetables 5/5, most positive environmentally.
This makes me all the more ready to get away from the countryside and into the central, haute Pyrenees, that sanctuous fortress of nature that few ever have the opportunity to see, much less experience. Some of the most spectacular hiking above 2,000m and peaks above the magic 3,000m await us there.
That’s one of the best parts about a thru-hike–the negative parts in the beginning make you so ready for the parts you’ve really been looking forward to!
On the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), I spent the whole 800 miles of New Mexican deserts looking forward to the San Juans and RMNP, I suffered through the whole Great Basin in Wyoming to make it to the Wind River Range and Yellowstone, I hiked gnarly terrain and faced off with grizzly bears and mountain lions in Montana, just to step foot in the holy land of Glacier National Park.
On this hike, I am especially looking forward to the national parks, the stretch from Candanchu to Andorra, the high pyrenees, legendary for their grandiosity among hikers and mountaineers.
Back to the story: we almost made it to the top of Burga when my hiking partner really started feeling the pain of her ankle and strep throat. For some reason she started walking down the hill the wrong way in a big hurry.
“That’s not the right way!” I yelled.
No response.
“The trail goes over the top here!”
No response.
Worried she might get lost, I ran through ferns and brambles while keeping the same elevation so as not to miss the trail we were supposed to follow at the top.
Ah well. We both found ourselves at the right junction later on, and carried on towards Aldudes.
After stopping for water, we decided it would be best to camp just before the downhill into town, and to go in early tomorrow and spend a full nero (nearly zero mile) day resting and recovering from sickness and the strain of the Pyrenees so far. Also, we need to be in peak shape to tackle the 108km of wilderness between Aldudes and the village of Lescun.
And boy, did we score with our campsite! We couldn’t have asked for a better view to have dinner and spend the end of a long day. As I type this, the sun is barely inches above the horizon, moving through a dark cloud to a patch of sky between it and the horizon, centered between two mountains. Here are pictures. They won’t do it the justice it deserves, but the image is forever burned into my retinas. Goodnight Sun!
