Ansó, 14 July
by Isabel Isherwood - 06:41 on 14 July 2017
Rowan and I have been for an adventure. We enjoyed our walk around Vignemale so much that Rowan didn’t really want to come back, so we hatched a plan to go to the Valle de los Sarrios – the Valley of Chamois – for a night. Iona had other plans and didn’t want to come, so she stayed with Jake and Rowan and I went alone. We’ve been to the Valle de los Sarrios before, the first time we did a big walk in the Pyrenees three years ago, and it was such a magical place that we were determined to go back. In a year here we have still not got round to it – until now.
It is a fairly short walk – only about five kilometres, but with six hundred metres of climb, starting from the beautiful mountain refuge of Lizara. It begins with a short sharp climb to the flowery Ordelca plateau, blue with fabulous Erygium thistles, then a brief respite before another steep climb up the Ordelca valley alongside an ominously dry mountain stream. The lower valley is steep and rocky, the path climbing slightly vertiginously through scree; higher up it is more verdant, still steep but broken into little shelves and hollows full of irises, and here to my relief the stream was flowing again. Passing alongside the stream through a narrow rocky cut, we came out into the open green bowl of the Bernera valley, tucked in below the steep rocky slopes of Bisaurin. Here to our delight was a group of chamois with babies (lambs? kids? calves?), that were evidently so accustomed to passing walkers, or else so sure that no harm would come to them, that instead of fleeing at the first sight of us, just drifted slowly further up the slope and largely ignored us. Marmots were everywhere, including more of their lovely grey babies. We turned to the east and made our way up the Bernera valley – a much gentler slope than those we’d already climbed, but by now we were starting to feel a bit tired. A moraine landscape of small hills near the top of the valley had Rowan beginning to despair, as each one seemed like the last hill before the Valley de los Sarrios, only to reveal another beyond. In fact it didn’t take too long to make our way through the moraines and over the low intervening ridge to drop down into the Sarrios valley itself.
It is a high hanging valley, facing north and backed by a cirque of rocky peaks. Although only small, it has plenty of character; it is almost entirely encircled by mountains, the mouth of the valley is little more than a cleft at a low point in the rocky walls; the stream passes through this gap and then disappears in a waterfall down a steep rockface towards the Estanes tarn on its rocky plateau 250 m below. The head of the valley is a jumble of boulders and pockets of soft flowery meadow, dropping down to a flat green oval valley floor. A seasonal lake fed by snowmelt near the valley mouth, full of water last time we were here, was virtually dry this time – just a few puddles full of tadpoles left.
Rowan chose a campsite on a small grassy meadow by the stream and among boulders in the upper part of the valley – plenty of potential for playing. She found Edelweiss, to her enormous delight, and carpets of Dryas growing over the tops of the boulders. I found vanilla orchids and pyrenean columbine. Chamois grazed their way through the rocks nearby, and I finally managed to see a wallcreeper.
After dinner, feeling refreshed, we climbed to the ridge to the west side of the valley to watch the sun go down. The view was staggering, from the far western end of the high Pyrenees around the Pic d’Anie and Petrachema to the Pic du Midi d’Ossau and further east to Vignemale; and below us the beautiful Ibon de Estanes reflecting the sky, and the French valleys all full of cloud.
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