Lost in the Snow

When I was writing about Port du Lavédan yesterday I didn’t mention a minor injury to my foot, as it didn’t seem important at the time. I’d been standing almost still and my left boot had slipped between 2 rocks, one above the other, so the side of my foot had been squashed between the rocks. I’d sworn at the time and thought how painful it was, then carried on.

In the middle of the night I woke up and the foot was in agony. Any pressure on the side of the left foot was excruciating, and when I tried standing up I thought the walk was over. At 01:15 I wrote in my diary that I thought I must have broken a bone and had got down to the refuge on pure adrenaline. I took a load of painkillers, lay there thinking how lucky I was to have made it to a refuge where we could call for a helicopter, and began planning what I’d do when I got home.

This morning I didn’t bother getting up in a rush as I knew I wasn’t walking. When I did finally drag myself out of the tent I was surprised that it didn’t feel as bad as last night. I wandered slowly over to the refuge and began wondering whether I might be able to carry on after all. In the end I took a load more painkillers and set off, and although it was sore for the first hour or two, it now feels fine. All very strange.

As a result of lying in bed feeling sorry for myself, I didn’t leave till 08:50, which wasn’t clever as the day had 8:15 of walking, not including stops.

The main feature of today was a huge climb (over 1,100m) from the bottom of the valley I was in last night up to Col des Cambalès at 2,706m. The guidebook mentioned that there might be some snow near the top in early summer, but no-one had mentioned the climb in any of the discussions I’d had in the last week about routes being closed, so I’d assumed the snow wasn’t too much of am issue.

As it was, I hit occasional snowy gullies from about 2,000m and permanent snow from about 2,150m, before I’d even reached Port de la Pèyre Saint-Martin. There were some obvious tracks across the snow that far, and when I began climbing on towards the col there were still a few, but these seemed to gradually disappear (I guess tracks from a day or two ago can easily melt) and pretty soon I was on my own.

This turned out to be a bad thing, as I began climbing up the wrong gully. After a while I realised things were not matching up with the map, so took a GPS reading. Just like yesterday the numbers were out, but this time it was my fault.

It took me ages to get back down the gully and around to the right one. I was already a bit worried about starting so late, as the snow had had the sun on it all day and was pretty soft, so adding an extra hour or so didn’t help.

The correct gully wasn’t too long, but it was very steep. I ended up front-pointing quite a lot of the time, which I hadn’t been expecting. Unlike yesterday’s mission the cloud didn’t complicate the descent - I dropped down about 400m on the snow then took the crampons off and hopped over boulder-fields down to 2,250m.

I’d realised some time ago that getting to the refuge was going to mean a late end, and since I wanted to camp it didn’t seem too important, so I’ve stopped an hour or so short, which I should be able to make up tomorrow or Friday before I reach Gavarnie.

At the moment I’m feeling quite intimidated by the snow. As well as the obvious danger of sliding, there are extra complications caused by the snow melting around rocks (so much so that one could suddenly fall several metres), rivers running under the snow, and in my case it seems, navigation. This last one should be pretty easy to fix, and I guess confidence regarding the rest will come with experience.