Walking in snow

The setting-off-reasonably-early plan we had, after the overnight stay above the village, hadn’t included the mass movement of cows on a major cross-border road on a Sunday morning!

All was going well as we sped north, until we noticed lots of squashed cow pats on the road. As they got ‘fresher looking’, the “cows must have wandered on here last night” became “there must be cows ahead”.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to find cows roaming even on a major route up and over to France, so I slowed down.

Then around the corner was a traffic queue and we stopped. Then we crawled and stopped and crawled and stopped. Very slowly we made forward progress but this lasted for half an hour. 

Eventually we realised that a huge herd was being driven ahead of us. To our relief, they finally stopped in a layby and our traffic jam was able to pass them.

Formigal is a ski resort just south of the border with France and it’s unknown to me. I was surprised to see the extent of the skiing using the piste map at the Anayet ski zone at 1,740m from where we would walk. This is a couple of Km up the road from Formigal which isn’t a ski-in / ski-out resort as far as I can see.

We followed a route in our classic walks in Spain book and also tracked ourselves using the Wikiloc app. It was a strenuous climb in intense sunlight as we followed the course of a stream up to a high lake at almost 2,000m. The views were stupendous and we had fun walking across the very big areas of remaining snow.

It was Sunday and many people were out from both sides of the border.

It was quite a pull, up and over the final rocky slopes and we realised how relatively unfit we were in a mountain walking point of view as legs were jelly at the top. We were happy with the performance as we had overtaken some people and no one passed us and we beat the suggested time in the book. “No bad then”.

Coming down was easier but it was a test of the knees! The 1.5Km back to the Landy along the ski road seemed a slog. According to Strava, we walked 12.5 Km (7.8 miles) with 712m (2,337 feet) of ascent.

We then drove the final few Km to the border and were surprised but then remembered that at the Pyrenees border crossings, the French do a lot of shopping. It was heaving. They were paying too much! Cherries were €6 per Kg but we had paid less than €4 a day or two earlier.

We made the border crossing without any problems and had lunch in the car park on the French side.

The larger summits are all ~2,500m although the one in the photo above that looks like a fish head, is nearly ~2,900m.

We drove back down the valley and travelled east along the southern flank of the mountains. Back in gorges and rivers, we approached a small tunnel we glanced down to see that there was an accessible river beach. We dived along the service road and headed down to the water for a chilly cool-down.

Later, a spur of the moment decision found us in a great campsite in Boltana. Camping Boltana was a surprise and delight.

Here there was 30C late afternoon warmth which meant that we sat out till bedtime. In all of the holiday, we have had few T-shirt evenings, especially in the country’s interior where, at the consistently high elevations of around 1,000m, the temperature often dropped quickly after ‘sundown’ and was a chilly 5 or 6 during the night.