down to Saragossa from Jaca. This of course takes you right out of the
Pyrenean country, but the first half of it at least is in the hills,
and no journey shows you better the nature of the outlier mountains on
the Spanish slope of the main range. Off the direct road one may make a
long elbow eastward to reach Huesca, which was St. Laurence’s town. The
surface is good, and there are few steep gradients, though there is a
long climb out of Jaca itself. From Jaca to Saragossa, by way of Huesca,
along this road, is just about 100 miles, and, as far as Huesca at least,
it provides a complete knowledge of the mountain types upon the Spanish
side of the watershed. Nor is this typical scenery anywhere finer than in
the splendid gorges and chimney-rocks of Riglos, nor is any one of the
parallel ranges more characteristic than the high Sierra de Guara, which
stands up above the burnt plain of Huesca, 30 miles out from the main
ridge, quite separate from the general range, and yet reaching a summit
of nearly 6000 feet.
All the roads suitable for motoring, especially in such a district as
this, are suitable for bicycling also. I say “especially in such a
district as this,” because the identity between motoring and bicycling
roads is more striking in the Pyrenees than in most parts of France,
since the expense and difficulty of making the great highways here has
been such that it was not worth while building a carriage road on these
hills unless the engineering was to be of the most perfect kind, and the
surface of the best, and the gradients as easy as nature would allow. The
consequence is that there are in the Pyrenees no roads (which he will
find in the plains) where a man on a bicycle can go with difficulty, and
a motor cannot go at all. Stretches of this kind, due to bad surface or
to steepness, are familiar to every one, but I can remember none of
the sort, not even of a few miles, between St. Jean Pied-de-Port and
Puigcerdá, nor between the French plains and the Spanish.
The question will, however, be asked by anyone who proposes to bicycle
in this district for the first time, whether the long gradients are not
such as to destroy the advantage of using the greater part of the roads.
To this objection a general rule applies, one which will seem a little
unusual when it is first read, but which I have found from experience
to be true. It is this, that the few crossings of the hills from north
to south make easier journeys for the bicyclist than do the lateral
roads across the ribs or buttresses of the main chain. Anyone going for
instance on a bicycle from Laruns to Lourdes, will have some very fine
scenery for his pains, and, if the day is fine, he will not regret his
experience, but he should be warned that on this lateral road most of his
energy will be taken up in slowly climbing the great pass over the Mont
Laid; for though it is but a few miles as the crow flies, it is a big and
toilsome business along the highway. Nor would that be the only pass. It
is characteristic of these lateral roads that they usually contain more
than one big ascent. He will be troubled again at the Col-de-Soulor and
to get from Laruns to Lourdes, though the two towns are in contiguous
valleys and no further apart than London and Windsor, would be a day’s
work for most men.
Another example of the same sort could be given from the other lateral
roads of the Pyrenees, as, for instance, the low cross road between St.
Jean Pied-de-Port and the valley of Mauléon. Here the pass is much less
high, but a mile or two from St. Jean, when you have gone through St.
Jean-le-Vieux, you begin to climb, and all the long way of the valley
of the Bidouze, and out again, over the next range, that overlooks the
Saison, is a succession of long wheelings uphill.
For the purpose of seeing some particular place in the next valley, it
may be worth while to follow one of these lateral roads, but a general
tour of that sort is not worth while. If, on the contrary, a bicyclist
chooses the main north and south roads, he will find many advantages
in the choice, and I would recommend in particular, as the best that
he can undertake in these mountains, the round from Oloron to Jaca and
back, which I have already described. Such a journey is a task taking
three full days, four or five easy days, and it gives such an opportunity
of contrasting two civilizations, and of learning the barrier which
separates them, as does not offer itself in so short a space anywhere
else, I think, in western Europe. I will not detain the reader in this
particular with what I have to say upon this road in general, for that
will rather concern the description I will make of it when I speak of
travel on foot, but I will point out in what way it can be dealt with by
the bicyclist.
All the long road from Oloron to Bédous, though it leads to the very
heart of the mountains, needs no more energy upon a bicycle than does a
two-hours’ ride (and it ought not to take two hours) in any part of the
plains. There are one or two half-miles of hill, all of them rideable,
but the general run of the way is flat, or burdened with a slight rise
which is hardly perceived, and the approach to Bédous, in its magic
circle of hills, is actually _down_ along a fine slope, which faces the
last ridge and the frontier watershed. So far, it is a ride which one
may take even upon a high gear, and have for his pains as fine a survey
of great mountains as he will find in Europe. From Bédous the road cuts
straight across the dead level of the valley floor for 2½ miles, passes
a “gate” of rock, and thence continually runs through gorges up the 7
miles to Urdos. It rises considerably in this last bit—nearly 1 in 20—and
though the distance from Oloron to Urdos may not take one more than one
afternoon, anyone bicycling into Spain will do well to pass the night at
Urdos, for the big climb begins just after that place. In this hamlet, of
no pretensions, you may choose with advantage the little inn called the
“Hotel of the Travellers,” of which, and whose charming terrace, I speak
in another place.
Next day, unless you wish to accomplish a feat, you will begin to walk
up to the summit of the road. There are parts that can be ridden—the
last quarter is almost flat—but the earlier part and the larger is too
steep for comfort. The continental road-book makes the whole distance 12
miles, the kilometres by the roadside, which are somewhat more reliable,
make it 8, and so does the map; anyhow it is a continuous uphill which
should be taken leisurely, pushing one’s machine until one gets to the
flat bit at the top. The short cuts are here, unlike those of some other
cols, quite impossible to a bicycle, even when one is pushing it, and
the whole way must be taken upon the high road; if one can afford it, it
is wise to have the machine carried on a cart as far as the hospital, 2
miles from the obelisk which marks the frontier and the summit of the
pass; but whether one pushes it, or whether one has it carried, it is a
three-hours’ climb. It is wisest to take these three hours in the early
morning.
From the summit at the entry into Spain there is 2 miles of steep new
zigzag, falling a little too sharply, and all around is the very novel
aspect of the southern side of the range, where the dryness and the sun
have eaten up the forest; at the foot of this zigzag begins an easy and
continual run down of 7 or 8 miles into Canfranc; your bicycle takes its
own way; there is no place so steep as to fatigue one with the break,
still less to be of any danger. The 17 miles from Canfranc onwards
towards Jaca is a road upon the whole descending, but by that time one
has entered the foot hills, which are flat and undulating rather than
mountainous, and at Jaca you will find the Hotel Mur, which I have called
the kindest little hotel in Europe, and certainly one of the cleanest in
Spain.
You will leave Jaca early after spending there your second night. I am
not saying that the whole distance from Oloron could not be done in a
day, on the contrary, it could be done quite easily. A man could pass
the night at Oloron, starting in the early morning from that town, be at
Urdos easily by ten, lunch there at leisure, get to the summit by four,
and be down at Jaca before dark on a July day, and before the hour of the
late Spanish meal. But the climbing of the pass would fatigue him, it
would come at an awkward time of the day, and he would have to count upon
what is not so certain in the Pyrenees, fine weather. It is best to break
the journey at Urdos as I have advised.
From Jaca, a great road leads all the way down to Saragossa, throughout
scenery where you are at first amazed by the contours of the isolated
cliffs above the gorges of the Gallego, and afterwards almost equally
amazed by the aridity of the great plain that slopes down to the Ebro.
The run from Jaca to Saragossa is too much for one day in the hot season.
It had best be broken at Huesca. If he choose to make this excursion,
the traveller will have to return by the same road, and he would perhaps
be wise to save himself the tedium of it and to put his machine upon the
train, for a railway goes back, much as the road does, to Jaca.
If one does not take the excursion to Saragossa but returns to France,
the way is by Biescas, Sallent, and the Val d’Ossau.
The Biescas road leaves Jaca to the east and runs so for 10 miles, then
it goes 8 miles northward to Biescas.
From Biescas it begins to rise, in the last part heavily; and Sallent,
which is not 10 miles from Biescas as the crow flies, is nearly 1500 feet
higher. The gorge of approach to Sallent is a plain embranchment from the
Panticosa road at Sandinies about 8 miles from Biescas.
Sallent offers a problem to the bicyclist which it does not offer to
the man with the motor, and that is the problem of lodging. It is a bad
place to stop at, and yet the next place where one can sleep is over
the pass, 17 miles on at Gabas. One will have gone nearly 40 miles from
Jaca, and the last bit one will have been climbing all the way; for some
miles up to Sallent quite steeply, and more or less uphill all the way
from Biescas. To push the machine up another 8 miles to the summit (for
it cannot be ridden) is a task, but it is a task worth accomplishing,
especially if you have a long evening before you, for once on the summit
you will have not only a run down of 8 or 9 miles to Gabas without
putting your foot to the pedal, but also the prospect of the best inn
in the Pyrenees, the delightful inn which the Bayous who own it call
the Hotel des Pyrenees; or, if you like to take the whole pass at once,
you have nearly 20 clear miles downhill without stopping, past Gabas
to Laruns; but the inn at Laruns is not to be compared with the inn at
Gabas.
If one takes on a bicycle the round which I have spoken of for a motor
from Bayonne to Pamplona by the valley of the Baztan and back again by
Roncesvalles, there is no difficulty about inns, but on the other hand
there is a multitude of shorter hills, some of which cannot be ridden.
You could make two short days of the journey out by sleeping at Elizondo,
in which case on your first day you climb up a pass and down into a
valley, and your second day is a repetition of the same process. The
third day back from Pamplona to France has one hill at Erro, which you
will hardly be able to climb, but from that valley through Burguete and
right on to the top of the pass is rideable on any reasonable gear. From
the summit down to Val Carlos all the way to the frontier is one long
easy run down, and you may continue the valley road along the Nive as far
as you like upon the same day. Even Bayonne is not too far at a stretch.
As for those who wish to know how to get a series of long coasts in
these hills at the least pains, my advice to them is this: start from
Perpignan, take the train from Perpignan to Mont Louis. From Mont Louis
you have a run of 15 miles, falling 1000 feet all through the French
Cerdagne to Bourg Madame, uninterrupted save for two or three short
rises. At Bourg Madame next day an omnibus (with a very bad-tempered
driver—at least he was so in my day) will take you up the Val Carol to
the summit of the Puymorens; from there it is an uninterrupted coast all
the way down the valley of the Ariège to Ax, and beyond as far as you
like to go, 20 or 30 miles of downhill with scarcely an interruption.
The other way round is good coasting too. By the rail to Ax, up the
Puymorens by coach, coast down Val Carol, _ride_ up (through Llivia)
to Mont Louis and coast down the gorges of the Tet. It is only in this
eastern part of the range that you will get such long uninterrupted
downhills: there is, in the central part, the run down from the Pourtalet
(but no coach to take you up), and there is a coach up the Val d’Aran to
Viella, with a run back of a few miles down the Garonne; but neither of
these are like the Ariège valley or that of the Tet, and the roads up the
enclosed western valleys to Luz, Bagnères, etc., have not sufficient
fall for long coasting.
One ought not to leave the road system of the Pyrenees without saying
something on driving. Your best town, I think, for beginning a drive is
Oloron, and there is a job-master close to the station from whom you can
get horses and carriages by the day, by the week, or by the month. I do
not speak of this from my own experience but from what I have been told,
and I know that there are relays of horses all up the pass; but whether
the job-master has arrangements for relays I do not know. That sensible
kind of travel has so generally died out that I should think it doubtful.
It is better to depend upon the same horses for the whole journey, and
whether upon the round by Navarre or that by Jaca the posthouses are
frequent everywhere, your longest stretches without one being the bit of
new road, 17 miles long, between Sallent and Gabas, and the similar 14 or
16 miles between Urdos and Canfranc.
On the other roads, should you determine to drive along them, there is
one rather long piece without a relay up the Tourmalet, between the
eastern foot of that pass and Barèges; but this road is continually
traversed by carriages at all times, and there is sufficient provision
for the distance. These three are the only long gaps without relays which
you have to fear in driving through the Pyrenees. For the rest, except
that your days’ journeys must be so much shorter, what I have said of the
roads for motoring applies to driving also.
[Illustration]
V
TRAVEL ON FOOT IN THE PYRENEES
[Illustration]
The road system of the Pyrenees and the opportunities it affords for
motoring, bicycling, and driving are but a small part of what most
English readers desire to know about travel in these mountains. For most
men the pleasure of such travel is to be found in wandering upon foot
from place to place, in learning a district by slow daily experience, in
camping, and in the chance adventures that attach to this kind of life,
and also in climbing. Of climbing I can write nothing; it is an amusement
or a gamble that I have had no opportunity of enjoying. Those who think
of mountains in this way can learn all they need in Mr. Spender’s book,
“The High Pyrenees.” They can get more detailed knowledge from Packe—if
a copy of the book is still to be bought—and I am told by those who
understand such matters that the rock climbing of this range is among the
best and the most varied in Europe. In the matter of travel upon foot
other than climbing, I have some considerable experience, and this is
the sort of travel which I shall presuppose when I come to speak of the
various districts into which travel in the Pyrenees may be divided.
There are two ways in which travel on foot in these hills can be enjoyed;
the first is by laying down some long line of travel—as over the Somport,
across from the Aragon to the Gallego, and so through Sobrarbe to
Venasque—the second is by fixing upon a comparatively small district in
which one can slowly shift one’s camp from one day to another. In either
case, the aspect of travel on foot is much the same, and so are its
difficulties and its necessities.
I have heard it discussed whether a man should travel with a mule
in these hills. The practice has in its favour the fact that the
mountaineers, whenever they have a pack to carry and some distance to
go, travel with a beast of burden. The mule goes wherever a man can go,
short of sheer climbing, and it will carry provisions for some days. The
expense is not heavy; a mule is saleable anywhere in these mountains;
one can buy it at the beginning of a holiday and sell it at the end of
one, never at a great loss, sometimes at a profit. Nevertheless, upon the
whole, the mule is to be avoided. You are somewhat tied by the beast.
He is not always reasonable, and feeding him, though it will be easy
two days out of three, is sometimes difficult, for while he will carry
many days of your provisions, he can carry but few rations of his own.
With a mule one always finds one’s self trying to make an inn, and that
preoccupation is a great drawback to travel in the mountains. Moreover,
the keep of a mule, at a Spanish inn especially, is expensive. It is a
better plan to hire a mule occasionally, as one needs repose, or in order
to carry any considerable weight for a short distance over some high pass.
I presuppose therefore a traveller upon foot carrying his own pack, and
I will now lay down certain rules which my experience has taught me to
apply to this kind of excursion.
I shall speak later of what sort of kit one should carry, what amount of
provision, etc.; and I shall also speak later of the nature of camping in
these hills; but these two main things do not cover the whole business,
and the more you know of the Pyrenees, the more you will find them
enemies unless you observe the laws which they teach you in the matter of
exploring them.
Now, the first and the most essential of these laws to regulate your
travel is to make certain of no one distance in any one time. Do not
say to yourself “I will leave Cabanes” (for instance) “and will sleep
the night in Serrat.” Such plans are too easily made at home or on the
plains. One measures the distance upon the map, and the thing seems
simple enough. One may be lured into security by starting in fine weather
or over easy ground, but _unless you have been over the place before_,
never make a plan of this kind, and even if you know the territory,
beware of the false confidence which comes so easily in the plains, when
one has forgotten the terrors of the high places.
Here are two examples within my own experience to show what dangers
attend this sort of confidence, the first taken from the Aston, the next
from that very easy place, the Canal Roya; and remember that nothing I am
saying has to do with the fantastic exercise of climbing, but only with
straightforward walking and scrambling.
A companion and I had settled to force in 36 hours the passage from the
Aston valley into Andorra. There is a path marked upon the map; the
way is apparently quite clear and one might have made sure that with
provision and calculation for one night, nothing could prevent one’s
reaching the first houses of the Andorrans. On the contrary, this is what
happened.
The first evening was mild and beautiful, the sky was clear, the path
at first plain. It was so plain that we did not hesitate to continue it
after dark. Here was a first mistake, and the breach of a rule I shall
insist upon when we come to camping. Still, it was not this error which
destroyed us.
We slept the few hours of darkness under a thorn bush before a most
indifferent fire, and the next morning we began our way.
We came almost immediately after sunrise to a place where the valley
bifurcated, and that in so confused a manner, with so many interlacing
streams and so unpronounced a ridge between the main bodies of water,
that we took the wrong ascent by the wrong stream, and only found, when
we had ended in a precipitous cul-de-sac, that we had made an error.
We went back to the bifurcation (which, remember, was of that confused
sort where nothing but a very large scale map is of any use), and we
made up the other stream. The hours which we had lost had brought us
into the heat of the day, and the day was exceptionally hot. We climbed
a shelving slope at the end of this further valley: a matter of 2000
feet, very steep and rough. When we were already near the summit there
bowled over towards us from beyond it, without the least warning, a
violent storm. We were so close to the top, and there was so little
shelter on the open rocks we were ascending, that we thought it well to
gain the summit before halting. On the whole the decision was wise. We
found overhanging ledges upon the summit and took refuge there until
the worst of the downpour had ceased. But the storm left behind it a
mass of drifting cloud, now rising and now lifting, which made it quite
impossible to determine what our true way should be. The summit of the
slope was an open grass saddle with great boulders dotted about, and
from this saddle a man might go down one of three declivities which
branched southward from it. There was no seeing any complete view of the
valleys below even in the intervals of the drooping clouds, for, as is
so frequently the case in these steep hills, there was a great deal of
“dead ground” just below us. We had to guess which of the undulations of
the summit we should follow, we could not be certain until we had gone
down some hundreds of feet that we had definitely entered an enclosed
valley, but once on the floor of this we were fairly certain by our
general direction that we had crossed the main watershed and were in
Spain. The storm renewed itself; the late hour made us anxious, we pushed
on through the driving mist and rain, necessarily losing a consistent
view of the contours and the windings of the valley; when the sky cleared
again we saw before us a great open gulf stretching down for miles and
miles, and the very amplitude of the prospect further deceived us into
believing that we were certainly descending into the first of the Spanish
open places, but hour after hour went past and no sign of men appeared.
There were not even any huts in the Jasses. To confuse us still further
and to lead us on in our error, a definite path suddenly appeared; we
naturally made certain that it was the head of the valley road upon the
Spanish side. So confident were we that we _must_ by the map and by all
common sense be now close to habitations that, after consulting together
a little, we thought it wiser to eat what little provisions remained so
as to gather strength for a last effort, than to camp hungry and reserve
our food for the morrow. When we had so eaten it grew dark; hour after
hour of the night passed, and the path was still plain—but there was no
sign of men. By midnight we were dangerously exhausted and incapable of
pushing further: we lay down where we were by the side of a stream and
slept. The morning of the third day we might well enough have failed to
reach succour. We had come to the end of our powers, we had no more food
and it was only the accidental encounter with a fisherman who happened
to be thus far up in the hills that guided us to safety. He told us
that by choosing that particular one of the three slopes we had come
down, not upon the Spanish side, but into a long curving valley that
had led us back again into French territory. We had made a circle in
those forty-eight hours of strain and certainly had we not found him our
getting home at all would have been doubtful.
Now these errors, for which there seems very little excuse when they are
set down thus in print, were not only natural, but as it were, necessary.
Anyone unacquainted with the district _might_ have made them, and under
our circumstances _would_ inevitably have made them. Nothing but a large
scale map—which does not exist—would have saved us the hours lost at the
bifurcation of the streams, and not even a large scale map could have
properly decided us at the confused summit of the pass where a full view,
which the storm had prevented, was necessary to judging one’s direction.
The true remedy lay not in maps, however perfect, but in allowing for the
chances of error, in taking a full three days’ provision, and in avoiding
that sort of forced marching which had exhausted us, and which we had
only undertaken from fears about our remaining stock of food.