Refugi de Baiau – Arans, via Pic de Comapedrosa

Stuffing 15 people into a 9-person shelter is an interesting experiment. Everyone was up and out before dawn. Mark looked at us groggily as we boiled water for morning coffee. “How did you guys sleep? I woke up and it smelled intensely of barbeque… I turned my phone light on and stared right into the face of the Spanish guy sleeping on the floor next to me. He had chorizo for dinner and was breathing right into my face.” Holy lord, that’s grim. We howled with laughter as Mark buried his face in his hands. We were all successful adults who could have who could have spent our holiday at a nice beach, but instead chose hardcore Type 2 fun.

It took me 40 minutes to bound up the near-vertical pass. I felt unstoppable, digging my feet into the loose scree and shingle. My lungs felt like steam trains, endlessly powerful, it was too cold to even break a sweat. Mikolaj and Eva diminished into tiny moving dots far below. Two ibexes lurched above me, their hooves on shingle sounding like broken glass. The views were extraordinary from the Port de Baiau pass. A glance at the time showed 09.00, the time I would usually start work. I knew then that I could never live without this life. No job could provide this level of fulfilment, this was the real pulse and essence of life.

Mikolaj and I decided to add on the Pic de Comapedrosa, Andorra’s highest mountain at 2942 m. Only a short climb from the pass, I heaved myself up into the sunrise. And there lay the world below, swimming in a sea of fluffy clouds. I was standing in the sky and screamed for Mikolaj to hurry. “Its here, it’s here! Everything is here!” We both erupted into a series of wild yowls, laughing uncontrollably, jumping up and down in adrenaline-fuelled hysteria. You could see hundreds of miles in every direction, Aneto peak to the west and the green mountains of Andorra stretching out below us. We split a Kind bar and posed with the flag monument. It was the undisputed highlight of the GR11 so far. I could drink in those views for a day, but food lay waiting.

We charged down the stomach-churning mountainside like bulls, arms like windmills propelling us forward. A sapphire lake was too tempting to not swim in, albeit freezing cold. When you can have everything, you grab it with both hands. The mountainscape was beautiful, a glorious trail plunged down out of the alpine rocks down into lush meadows and forest. We passed Refugi de Comapedrosa and descended into bright green forest next to a cascading waterfall. The river took us all the way down to the paved roads of Arinsal. It was midday, and I pounced on two young women working at a café to ask whether the big food store would be open during the siesta.

«Do you have siestas here?»

“…what?”

“Siesta. Sleeping in the day.”

“…what?”

“SIESTA! *makes snoring sound and hand pillow gesture* DORMIR DURANTE EL DIA! SLEEPING DURING DAYTIME!”

“…what”

Mother of god! Fuck it! I lurched past her and raced down the street. Who the hell lives 3 km from Spain without knowing what a siesta is???

Sweet Jesus. Not only was the supermarket open, it contained the wildest delicacies I’d seen on the trail this far. Peach flavoured iced tea after four weeks of lemon! Crunchies! Maltesers! I walked up and down the aisles completely overwhelmed by choice. Mikolaj and I dove into veggie pasta and cheesecake for lunch, and Andorra instantly soared to the top of my list after the grim selection of canned lentils in Spain. We were almost too stuffed to walk back up into the forest for a final windy col before descending down through the pines into the tiny town of Arans.

I shared a twin room with Mikolaj, who I teasingly trail-named Decadence for his insane trail food habits. He carried a bottle of high-quality honey that weighed the same as my sleeping bag. He picked wild berries not to eat, but to flavour his water bottles. He carried two weeks’ worth of freeze- dried food from Poland. He had 10 spare memory cards for his GoPro and a razor with a bamboo shaft. “That’s not fair!” he protested at my last observation. “My shaving cream probably weighs the same as your hair!”

We walked down into the tiny patch of civilisation masquerading as “town” for a second pizza and chocolate cake dinner. Mark’s response to my dating woes were “You need to find someone who impresses you, or you’ll get bored” – the exact line one of my work clients served me after two hours of meeting me. I completely shared their assessment, the problem was that those men are 1) highly intelligent and thus correspondingly self-absorbed and 2) ultimately want a nice girl who is lower maintenance and won’t demand the emotional presence of them that I do. This year’s venn diagram of the men who wanted me and the men I wanted was two entirely separate circles with zero overlap. We walked back completely stuffed with carbs and sugar. Another day done.

 Arans – Encamp via Col d’Ordino

Pizza and camp stove coffee for breakfast (sneakily made in the hotel room). Run-in with the manager about payment as they tried to retract a discount they had offered us. Men who tell me to “speak nicely, girl” typically don’t win whatever fight they’re fighting.

Mikolaj and I flew over two smaller forest cols and had lunch at a sunny clearing with a creek. Pan y jamon was my destiny for this trip. Even though today held 1500m ascent and 1300m descent, I was cruising on autopilot with the Tough Girl Challenges podcast. I used my fingers as windshield wipers to flick away the sweat I was now accustomed to bathe in. I had long ago discarded my tops on hot days and just hiked in a sports bra, a revolutionary change. Col d’Ordino was flat on top with expansive views of forest-clad mountains. A short hop across before sinking back down into hot pine forest. Down, down, down endlessly towards Encamp buzzing down in the valley.

I teared up as I stood on the scorched outcrop. I’d walked here from the Atlantic. I didn’t view it as a massive achievement as I had my other hikes. Instead I felt humbled and grateful that I was able to make it here. I could so easily have succumbed to the darkness of the past two years. I thought back to that day in the city park in Pamplona, when I had been so afraid I’d made the wrong decision to thru-hike again. The fear of not belonging in this world anymore whilst being haunted by the past of another one. I looked across the Col d’Ordino back towards the hundreds of miles of mountains I had come from. There was no more emptiness. I felt present in every cell of my body, which I inhabited fully again at last. No more looking in the mirror to scrutinise the lines that I felt someone else had drawn onto my face. This body was a powerhouse of muscle and strength, and I was flipping proud of it. I felt young in the best way possible. Maybe this was being 25, just two years later than planned. Life lay as wide open as the landscape ahead of me, and I truly felt like the centre of gravity in it. Like a million overheated dollars.  

Annie the Quad Queen was the only one faster than me out here. I thought back to the countless “I’m dying” moments on my previous thru-hikes. Glen Pass, the climb to Starveall Hut, the Motatapu Track, Monte Cinto. I hadn’t had a single one of those on the GR11. The Basque country had been boring and extremely uncomfortable, but the despairing “I need this to end now” hadn’t hit me once since then. Maybe this was resilience. The quality I’d always thought I’d lacked, that I’d asked every therapist to teach me. My life was fuelled by ambition and attitude, but the ability to bounce back from adverse events had always eluded me. You can’t undo a childhood or even an adulthood, but maybe this trail was the experience of what I couldn’t see plainly but had to experience bodily. My legs were carrying me in the literal sense, and finally now I felt like I could carry myself again. My pack was but an afterthought, I looked hunched over whenever I stood up without it.

Encamp was sweltering and lovely. My hotel room was perfect, with a small balcony facing the sunny street, banners of Andorran flags hanging between every building. I cracked in the next-door supermarket and purchased moisturiser and flowery-smelling deodorant. I also unashamedly ate two brioche croissants in a row at the café where I wrote the notes for this blog.

I looked in the full-length wardrobe mirror. How many times hadn’t I looked the past two years, a tear-streaked husk full of unfamiliar lines and a sorrow so plain it seemed constitutive of every feature? A spitting image of what Cheryl Strayed had called “the woman with the hole in her heart”. Now I leaned in and really looked. Freckles, climber arms, sweat-induced ringlets. My mother’s eyes. Coral Icebreaker t-shirt which had been plastered to me on every mile since Arthur’s Pass in January of 2018. Slightly chipped front tooth, needed to fix that. The face looked kind, like the face of a friend. Smiling.

 Encamp – Refugi de L’Illa

I woke up with what two years ago would have been a non-event, but was now a crisis. Sore throat. Achy ears. A tiredness that coffee couldn’t cure. A was panicking and numbly chewed through the eggs, kiwi, and croissants at the hotel. Looking back, I should obviously have gotten a covid test at one of the city’s pharmacies, but I tried ignoring my blocked nose as I trudged upwards out of town and into the forest. Another beautiful day dawned, and I was soon distracted from my germy woes by the stunning beauty of the forest as it gradually gave way to mountains. This was California territory. Sunlight filtered through the trees and for once, the trail undulated gently instead of shooting upwards. Today was all about enjoyment, I knew I wanted to stay at the modern Refugi d’Illa overlooking a stunning basin below a lake. No need to rush, just savour the last few days on this magical adventure.

The longer I walked, the prettier nature became. I felt completely in awe at the acid-green grass speckled with wildflowers, the stately pines, the broad dirt trail, the countless little rock pools in the river. This was wonderland for wanderers. I could keep doing this forever, cold and all. The stones were so white, the skies so blue. The mountains so majestic and the views so expansive. A dream day on a dream trail. If you are reading this and contemplating a thru-hike in Europe, please hike the GR11.

Almost too soon, the trail flattened out into a basin where a lake had dried out. Refugi d’Illa looked like a structure from an architect’s magazine, grey and modern, and utterly massive with a row of huge glass windows. Two little grey donkeys grazed in the shadow of the refuge, and I crossed a small stream to sit on the big sunsplashed deck. I heard the donkeys take off towards the stream, and true enough, five horses led by very sweaty riders ambled over the hill. I felt a pang of jealousy. My job as a horse trekking guide in Norway was the one thing I would always regret leaving behind. I still identified as having it, I couldn’t accept that my time at Venabu was over. For five years, I’d spend the entire summer in the saddle, riding scores of horses and meeting hundreds of people. It will always be one of the best parts of my life.

An enormous, glittering white Pyrenees mountain dog walked slowly towards me where I sat on a table eating my gummies. I stuck out a tentative hand and the bear-sized canine welcomed me to L’Illa with big, gentle licks. An absolute teddy, apparently the prized pet of one of the refuge employees. Pancho immediately recognised me as a fellow polar bear and spent the rest of the day lying by my feet. The two of us ate our dinner outside while all the other guests were served food inside at the tables. I had a cold swim in the lake up from the refuge.

I nursed my stuffy nose without drawing too much suspicion from my fellow bunkmates. Both Mark and Eva arrived and booked in for the night, but Mikolaj had hiked onwards to save the hut fee. Rain started pattering down in the evening, and we thought about Mikolaj getting trapped in a potential night storm. Little did we know just how bad it would get.

 Refugi de L’Illa – Refugio de Malniu

01.30 AM. Furious lights flashing outside the window every other second. Enormous thunderclaps shook the ground. Everyone sat up in their beds and looked out at the light display. My mind instantly went to the horses outside, their metal shoes were lightening rods, and I was terrified for Mikolaj who was camped somewhere beyond the nearby col. Aside from Goriz, this was the worst thunderstorm I’d witnessed on the whole trail. Mark and I looked at each other across the room and I knew we were thinking about the same thing. There wasn’t much to do but go back to sleep, burying my head in my sleeping bag and hoping.

A crowd of zombie-like hikers crawled out of the dorms that morning. I gave Pancho a long goodbye hug before we left. He rested his heavy head on my shoulder and inched closed until he sat on my feet. Truly the bestest boy. I was sorely tempted to steal him. I had a low fever and felt weak. Popped two ibuprofen and plodded up the trail, past the lake, over the small col barely registering the view, and down into a damp forest of black pines. The skies hung heavy and grey, and I donned my hideous FroggTogg raincoat for warmth.

Coming through the trees, I saw a flash of red on the trail ahead of me, and to my enormous relief, it was Mikolaj in his red puffy packing up his camp. He saw me and just shook his head. He was pale as a sheet. “Holy fucking shit. It was like a disco you know, with the lightning. I was so scared I could puke. Never in my life was I so scared!” Here was another person whose heart rate would never be low in a summer storm ever again. “But you know, after an hour I was just like come on then! Kill me if you want, God!” The scene was so reminiscent of the ocean storm scene in Forrest Gump where Lieutenant Dan dares divinity to strike him down. I told Mikolaj as much. Well then. Lieutenant Dan it was. A trail name to carry forever as a token reminder of that crazy night.

Onwards through the bottom of the valley and then up towards the big col of the day. Circles of blue appeared in the sky, and I could see Eva a few hundred metres behind me. The trail was barely discernible here, and I weaved among 700 000 cow patties (and a few live samples). The climb became uncomfortably steep, and I found by trail blocked by a huge cow. We stared blankly at one another for a long moment. “I can’t read your expression, but I come in peace,” I eventually told her and strode on by. The top of the col was enormous and flat, with pristine views of a landscape that almost reminded me a bit of Scotland. Blue skies and lush valleys lay ahead. I sat down to wait for Mikolaj and Eva, and we walked onwards together past a stunning granite bowl, a stone hut, and green valleys becoming dry pine forests around the crest leading to Refuge de Malniu. Around the mountain bend, I could see the great lowland valley lying below, with a shining city in the middle. The finish line.

As I stopped to ponder the enormity of the journey I was about to complete and looked down on Puigcerdá, I heard a great whoosh above me – like a long exhale. I looked up and could only exclaim a breathless “oh!” as a great griffon vulture swooped not three metres above my head. Its back and white spangled body and bald head looked both gruesome and majestic. Its wingspan was considerably longer than I was tall. It cruised the winds like a glider jet. A last wild gift from the mountains. Looking out at the great flat valley and the mountains beyond, I surprised myself by wishing I could have gone on. I wanted to make it beyond the city, onto Nuria and the Mediterranean. This was the first thru-hike I’d ever done where the end didn’t feel like a relief, where I felt like I was getting stronger by the day.

After 2,5 years of mental illness, I wanted to unlearn my learned helplessness and start defining myself by my capabilities rather than limitations. If I was strong enough to complete a thru-hike in style, who knows what other things I could do. I decided to sit down once back in London and really think about what could be next on my adventure journey. Everything I’d ever set out to do, I had accomplished. Maybe the time was ripe to explore some entirely new horizons.

Malniu was connected via road and was correspondingly busy with families fishing, biking, and hiking. I sunk down at a wooden table in the afternoon sun, relieved that the day was over, and certain that today was a hut bed day (not taking any chances on getting fried by lightning on my last night). I was timely running out of food, and ordered whatever egg dish they could serve me. “Is a French omelette okay?” asked the young server. I had to laugh – lady, I’ve literally only had mini Oreos to eat today!

The rain instantly morphed into hail and snow. “It’s like being back in Norway”, I joked. One of the Spanish men sitting in the living room jumped up and spent and age and a half flicking through countless pictures on his phone to show me a Norwegian flag and troll statue from his fjord cruise trip. As evening rolled in, skies cleared into a deep purple with gold streaks. My trail family of four sat down to eat enormous bowls of pesto pasta and enjoy this last night of mountain wilderness.

 Refugio de Malniu – Puigcerdá

The last morning of the GR11 trail dawned with blocked sinuses but a spectacular sunrise reminiscent of California. Eva and I set out through the emerald pine forest. Sunlight filtered through the dewy trees in golden splashes. What a time to be alive. What a beautiful place to see.

Once through the forest, the trail opened up onto a vast green flat. We lunged out, racing each other and the sun’s rays beneath the never-ending skies. This was everything: beauty, energy, being-in-the-world. Wild.

Our trail swopped down for miles over scorched brown earth, the temperature rising with every hour. The giant valley lay ahead. We passed a flock of draft horses, red roan foals stretched lazily on the ground for their morning nap. We talked career and relationships. Eva had never quite warmed to me, but we had a lot in common as women working in international relations – a man’s world. The trail led us through tiny stone villages and through sparse green forest, through fields and alongside real roads. A flock of young girls surrounded us asking if we would buy their lemonade. As two sworn feminists, of course we spent our last Euros supporting female entrepreneurs! And who can say no to cold lemonade on a long forest path in 30 degrees?

Having exhausted everything but the will to reach the end, we sped towards Puigcerdá on slender sidewalks, breathing in exhaust fumes for the first time in weeks. We climbed the hill towards the centre (how deeply inconsiderate to perch a city on such a big hill). Racing over cobblestoned streets, we finally saw the huge clock tower, our beacon signalling the end of our journey.

VICTORY!

We sank down at a tapas bar ordering eight different dishes and rosé wine. Mark and Mikolaj came cheering shortly after. Our final hours together, we spent under the leafy canopy of the giant plaza tree. Puigcerdá was quaint and fundamentally southern European, with a deep commitment to long siestas and a vibrant old town. The shops with glass facades sold all kinds of turron and local sweets, souvenirs, jewellery, and long dresses. Eva and I wandered around aimlessly for a couple of hours, buying a train ticket to Barcelona at the small train station, until we retired to our rooms with snacks instead of dinner. She wasn’t a hypersocial person, but she made me miss my own mom whom I would luckily be reunited with in less than 24 hrs. I spread out all my stinky gear one last time in my pretty room, had a shower, and snuggled under the covers with what was left of my book.

I watched lightening and storms flicker over the darkening evening skies. Somewhere out there, Mark and Mikolaj, Max and Jake were looking up at the same skies to assess whether they were safe. Their journey would end by the sea, and a big part of me wished I could go with them. I looked longingly at the mountains to the east, feeling like a machine that could go on forever.

At the end of the West Highland Way, I was tremendously excited to have completed my first thru-hike. At the end of the John Muir Trail, I was starving and ran into Lone Pine for a burger, triumphantly knowing I could take on the big trails. Reaching Bluff after 1400 km on the Te Araroa, hobbling on bad hips and utterly demolished, meant everything, and became a before/after moment in my life. The amputated ending of the GR20 in Corsica was unceremonial, but I was also off to university in London and had bigger fish to fry. This was the first thru-hike to end in a way that felt profoundly anticlimactic. I didn’t feel ready to go back to work, to chase down emotionally unavailable men who carried an EpiPen lest someone mentioned the word “commitment”, nor to figure out what I was ready to do with “the rest of my life”.

For a month I had only had to do one thing: follow the white and red markers and stay alive. Now the markers were gone. No more indication of which way to go. The trail is simple. All there ever is, is forward. I sat in bed watching the skies darken into night, feeling a bit lonely, but knowing that somewhere out there, there would eventually be another path for me.