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Day 4: Pic de Lucia peak

Each day's route is shown by a red track with yellow highlight.  On "loop" days, our return trip is a blue track with yellow highlight. Starting and ending Refugios are marked in yellow, while lunch spots are marked by a blue circle (since map areas overlap, several may be shown). « Previous  |  Route Index |   Next »

Route: Refugi Ventosa i Calvell to Pic de Lucia and return Slog rating  [1="Easy" to 10="Argh!"]: 7 (a challenging climb, a sodden descent) Net climb: +550m Total time (including stops): 8h45 We awoke to some newly discovered muscles asserting their displeasure with the previous day's excursion.  But no matter. After confirming a two-day booking at Refugi de Colomers (to replace Estany Llong), we set out towards a trio of peaks that included our goal:  Pic de Lucia.  We botched the directions and ended up having to climb more than necessary -- the recorded lesson is "intuition schmintuition". We saw some sort of bird of prey as we prepared to "attack the peak" (probably a falcon), our first sighting of novel wildlife for the day.  While the fauna of the Pyrenees left us many "gifts" on the trail, the fauna themselves were typically hard to find. The final ascent was somewhat scary -- grassy but extremely steep.  The peak itself was unbelievably small -- it was as though the stereotypical pyramidic sketch of a mountain became our grotesquely exaggerated reality.  There we were, with barely enough space to fit ourselves and our equipment at the top.  The challenge?  Don't drop anything (or anyone) off the peak! Then came the storm.  Oh, the storm.  We saw it far off (dark, dark clouds), heard it (thunder), and then saw it some more (lightning).  So we left the peak quickly.  And descended very quickly. In all, we had covered what seemed to be about 8-9km on the way there and back, ascending roughly the same net vertical distance as the day before (~550m). As we took stock of our injuries at the mid-point of the trip, and speculated on the influence of said injuries on our non-record-setting hiking pace, the name "Escargots" (then "Team Escargots from Narbonne") was first suggested.  This immediately led to the requisite making of bad wordplays ("Escargots on the Escarpments"). With our snail-based identity established, another "dinner dash" under our belts, and visions of the beautiful lakes near Colomers dancing in our heads, we headed to sleep.