It is true, it is a great drive and as it’s tight, the bigger stuff can’t get up from either side.
These guys did; 2CVs manage to do most things. Also this solo driver from Germany was here. You couldn’t miss him as the sound from his 911 Classic Porsche was something else. It’s a 1980 model and he told me it was a hard drive as he has no servo steering. It made our 110 seem positively modern by comparison.
It seemed as though a walk into a mountain bowl was in order and we armed ourselves with provisions for a few hours and donned the boots.
As soon as we rounded the corner, the noisy pass was out of earshot and we left people behind.
One walker did advise that if we could get up to Petite Cayolle then the rest of the walk to the beautiful frozen lakes would be straightforward.
We imagined what might happen and started to focus on a snow slope in the distance.
It was a lovely walk, the path was dry except in a few parts and the streams easy to cross. Flowers were pushing through but it’s high and ‘late’ up here.
As we get nearer, the back wall of the mountain got steeper and we decided that lunch was in order as we contemplated things.
A solo walker came over the col and very slowly made his way down, making full use of his batons. We don’t have suitable walking poles, as we’ve never got around to sorting out two full pairs. Also they need that spreader thing at the end, to prevent them from digging into snow.
During lunch we were alerted by a noise behind us and to the side. A very large rock was making its way downhill, thankfully we weren’t in its path. It seemed to roll in slow motion and took an age to stop. If necessary we would have got behind the boulder we were sitting on.
After lunch we decided to try to go up, by either walking in previous steps or making our own. However the shape of the slope was such that as we stepped onto it from the rocky path, we were already a 100m above the bottom of the snow patch. So a slip would be a slide down. It might have been fun.
Just for scale, a person standing on the col would have been a small speck on the skyline
So we turned around, not so much because ascending was tricky; it wasn’t so bad. The thought of trying to stamp steps coming down without slipping though was more concerning.
We came off the snow and I tried a scree slope up the side but again it was disconcerting. It wasn’t easy to decide if the rocky traverse higher up was going to be exposed or an easy-feeling scramble.
That was that. We didn’t conquer Petite Cayolle but then no one else did either in the few hours we were there. Later we did see someone come onto the col from the far side but during our longish walk back to the road there was no sign of them actually trying to descend our side.
Comments