Ansó, 7 October
by Isabel Isherwood - 11:40 on 07 October 2016
Spanish lunch has turned out to be great!! I’m not sure how much they eat, but there is a boy who is apparently guaranteed to be fussier – and noisier about it – than either Iona or Rowan, and they are revelling in being the good ones. It also seems to be fun….. So now we have two days a week from 10 until 5 with no children…..
And so today, Jake took a break from long days at his desk and working into the evenings, and we drove up the valley to Zuriza and climbed Peña Ezcaurri. This could be described as the point where the ‘real’ mountains of the Pyrenees begin: west of here the hills are forested almost to the summits; to the east they are rocky and broken and inhospitable and beautiful. Peña Ezcaurri is a rocky whaleback of shattered limestone, plummeting abruptly in cliffs and screes to the Ansó valley at its eastern edge. The climb is pretty much straight up, passing through beech forest - in which all the tree grew in a strange ‘j’ shape, leaning out from the slope before bending and growing up vertically. We were very puzzled by this (still are, in fact) – the only potential explanation we have come up with is that it could have something to do with the weight of snow in the winter forcing the young trees to bend?? Above the beech forest the climb continued through mixed scree and steeply-angled limestone slabs (which must be lethal in wet conditions), to arrive at the rocky plateau of the summit: clints and grykes and probably trolls too, and the fabulous Pyrenees stretching away to the east.
Two things stand out about this day. The first was a group of maybe sixty or so cranes migrating south across the Pyrenees in a high, constantly shifting V. We heard them before we saw them, their strange bubbling musical calls reminding us of a pitch-black night in Biguezal in November almost six years ago, when we heard the same sound overhead but had absolutely no idea what it could be. Over Peña Ezcaurri the V formation broke up as they took advantage of a thermal, spiralling up and up and up in three wide loops before turning once again to the south and receding into the blue empty sky.
The second was simply that we were climbing a mountain together, just the two of us. The last time we did this was Beinn Iadain one bright day in December about three years ago; and before that – well, probably before Iona was born.
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