Catalan Pyrenees (2014)

Today my erstwhile home Mammoth Lakes officially smashes the biggest snow year on record, and I’m bundled up inside reminiscing on warmer times, and the stupid shit I miraculously pulled off in my younger and more durable days. Nearly 10 years ago, I accidentally went on my first solo backpacking trip. Without a clear reason, I’d always wanted to visit Spain, and after a series of tragi-comedy no-goes, I was extremely broke and hitchhiking from Barcelona to the Spanish Pyrenees by myself.

I took the last leg by train, to Puigcerdà (pronounced Poo-chair-da).

Such a spacious, affordable train with no one on it??

Train views of the countryside

The tidy ski/bike racks on the train blew my little USian brain

Europe is not the temperate Sierra Nevada, or the deserts of Utah (the only places I’d backpacked previously). These mountains are juicy, and I was immediately schooled by many hours of pouring rain! I wrapped my backpack with my tent tarp, which did the job, but I remember my fingers being SO COLD.

Threatening rain clouds adds dynamism

My first time in a mountain outside the US, I was shocked to run into refugios, huts, cabins, and villages. Why was there civilisation in the mountains? How is there so much livestock? Imagining cows stomping my analogous home mountains of the Sierra felt so alien.

Guess the leave-no-trace ship has sailed here

Charming refugio

I remember trying to infer the culture from the artifacts, like the unmanned refugios–was I allowed to stay the night? I peaked inside a collection of them, the range of quality was very broad:

Fancy unmanned refugio, with real beds

Extremely primitive unmanned refugio

Deluxe cabin that serves hot food and a bed. First time seeing the hut-to-hut phenomenon. We don't have these in the US! I thought it'd be nice to stay in one when I'm old and retired

Wild camping is a free option for broke kids

Sometimes waking up to loud company

I didn’t do any trip planning aside from a vague goal to exit from Andorra (the mini-country sandwiched between Spain and France). Since it was 10 years ago, I bought a paper map, and stitched together sections of the GR-11 and Haute Route. I had primitive offline gps phone maps (probably OSM), but didn’t load tracks or route names.

Very old school but I literally bought a map

If you put fuet and tomato into ramen that's a well-rounded meal for a 20 year old right?

tea and dinner

Maybe this is a factor of it being 10 years ago (pre-backpacking explosion), or perhaps my pieced-together routes rather than sticking to a single JMT-like superhighway, but I remember the trek being so desolate. There were hardly any people after leaving the villages. In my last day, I remember feeling so lonely I was singing out loud just to hear my voice.

Alpine views. What are those stone faces, and can I climb them??

I have a distinct memory of the trails to and from the alpine passes feeling much steeper than American trails, and wondered if they’d been cut before switchbacks were invented. (Would I still feel this way, with all the fitness and experience I have now?)

Snow at the pass, in July

Extremely shocked to see people filling their water bottles out of pipes like this, without applying a water filter. And with cows around every corner too?? Evidently US backpacking has made me weak.

Also my first time seeing trails marked out like this. Paint on rocks, paint on trees, paint on buildings through a village!

Hobbit refugio

Cooling off swollen beans

Vintage selfie (about as much as my camera phone could manage). Back then it felt extremely worthwhile carrying a mirrorless DSLR, as unwieldy as they are.

Ran into a Barcelona dog club on their annual retreat, and hung out with ~20 dogs in an alpine setting. Wild! Trippy. Was it a dream?

Stone walkway exiting into Andorra