Everything had been so plain sailing that I felt spoilt again by the success of my four peaks and the end of my adventure. The top of Ballhivernas was the hardest to obtain though, and I almost closed my eyes in order not to spook myself with peripheral glances at the immediate chasm that opened down to my left. The peak was 3062m while the valley floor was at about 1300m. The diagram above is uncannily accurate, except the tarn at '3' was in the next valley above '9' which is where the dotted red line on my map told me to go. The Spanish couple had wandered around looking for a way down as bemused as I was by the apparent lack of an obvious descent route. Then they disappeared from view and I was alone. I saw them later heading north 50 meters apart making their way slowly down some grey scree. Not happily!
The path I followed must have been used last in the 1930's by some Hemmingway character sneaking arms into Spain, listening for tolling bells and ricocheting bullets, perhaps to a Hoagy Carmichael melody.
Back in the here and now I found footsteps, just one set, (no, not my own) that headed round the bowl of scree that fell into a small and very rusty looking tarn. I followed them sensing that it was one way and going back in this heat, up this terrain, would be too difficult later to even bear thinking about. But I trusted myself to cope with whatever lay ahead and that was a seminal moment for me. I didn't feel brave and I wasn't scared. Far away on the other side of the valley I could see the lake where I should have met Martin and Barbora.
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| Martin on Aneto |
Trees in the valley below looked minute but I had to ignore that, it confused my understanding of how I would get down! The rocks in my hanging valley were as irregular as in the picture of Aneto above, I stumbled round to the top of the waterfall that was fed by the rusty tarn. I climbed down it crossing over it occasionally It seemed easy and I kept going to the bottom of it when it disappeared into the mountain and I was on another lower hanging valley floor. Looking up the waterfall I was amazed, wishing I had power in my camera phone to record it, I was at the bottom of a 30 meter waterfall with my just my 13 kilo bag, some chocolate and all the water I could drink. I still had a long way to go but staying near the river seemed to provide the best access to lowerness and I descended steadily. Sometimes I had to rock-climb down dry waterfalls which was fun, each new ledge had more flora until gradually I arrived at the tree line and approached the valley floor. A marmot stuck his head up from his earth mound and considered me for a while. I should have headed for the river and got over it before it became a gorge but I had a suspicion I could reach the cabana on this side and meandered down through pine-tree graveyards and cattle filled meadows following carefully built cairns until after crossing a wooden bridge a track led me to the refugio Colomers.
What a disappointment! Not a guarded sanctuary with all the benefits introduced by the Romans over the centuries, sewage, hot water, electricity etc but full of similarly worn out trekkers having just conquered Aneto or preparing to.
I dumped my bag and asked a young Czech the time, it was 8.00pm. another 12 hour day. The young man was one of three brothers, he'd twisted his ankle and they were all waiting for it to heel. They gave me an enormous mug of tea and set about making another one. I was more than grateful. There was a bus stop near by which I walked over to and learned I could get a bus in the morning to Benasque. Naively I believed this large town would be able to connect me to France and Lourdes airport, eh huh, no sir!
I ate my last dried boef bourginon with water from the Czech kettle and crept into my tent at about 9.30.
In the morning I woke up and could hardly open my eyes! Conjunctivitis? Mosquito bite? Who knows, but when the swelling had gone down enough for me to see out of them I noticed a coach standing with its engine chewing diesel! Bugger not 8.00 o'clock then, 7.00! Anxiety, only yesterday a hazy memory, leapt back into my life and oversaw a hasty rucksack packing and ginger skip over to the quivering footplate under a closing door......
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