Boondock Puffins

Paper maps or digital? Compass on your phone or physical? Packing an emergency pick axe or winging the route?

We both grew up in families where these weren’t even questions that you thought about: physical, hard copy maps, compasses, binoculars, emergency survival kit – everything was packed and taken. As a result, we usually go with this approach too.

However, when a local recommended to us the app Komoot, we thought we would give it a try in a low risk environment: a flat walk along a valley to a reservoir and back. A flawless plan, right?

We set off from home before sunrise, driving to a relatively high up start at about 2200m and arriving in the dark. Surveying the paths around us, we found our very sensible, slightly boring walk (this may be entirely unfair, we still haven’t taken this route, I’m just consoling myself with the idea that we made a good choice), compared it to a route that went straight up the side of the mountain and decided one looked much more fun that the other… up we went!

As is all too often the way, what looked to be a steep but short climb to the ridge was in fact a steep but very long climb to the first of many, many ridges on the way up to the real ridge. On no less than 4 occasions did we agree that it would probably be best to turn back. Each time, fate (in the form of embarrassment) intervened. Firstly, a Germanic middle aged duo asked if we knew where the path had gone as we caught up to them – the answer, it turned out, was that the path went straight up and over a rocky outcrop that involved a bit of bouldering and white knuckles. As we were apparently now path leaders, there could be no turning back despite the nerves of this moment. Upon reaching a very intimidating looking ridge, we hesitated as Eliza was not convinced her jelly legs would hold out. This time the duo told us it would be such a shame to miss the next part of the hike alongside the glacier (yes, glacier!) as it turned out they had hiked the route a few years previously. Now sold on this we resolved to carry on for a few more hundred metres and reassess the situation.

We stopped for coffee under an even more intimidating climb, choosing to focus on the view across at the other mountains rather than at what we had left to face.

As we packed up and started up the next climb, a lovely French man made conversation with us. Unfortunately this was in rapid French and with no context and as such, it was very tricky to untangle his animated words. All we could really understand was that he was eighty, and something about “huit fois”… as it turns out, he was saying it’s his eight (and last) time climbing the mountain, and that he wanted to make sure we knew how cold it was as we went up even higher (we had a lot of layers, but not the ice pick and crampons he had).

The last scramble up past the glacier was only slightly overshadowed (literally) by some miraculously appearing cloud! We knew that there was a section of the route that we would turn around at as it was marked out as a black route, needing specialist skills and experience. We got half way along the side of the glacier and checked the map as it got a little slippy and scary only to find that we’d already traversed the expert section! Nothing to do but carry on up.

The way down had been in the back of our minds the whole way, knowing we would need to go back down the way we went up. As it turns out, it was not so bad, particularly as the ice had melted as the sunshine came up so paths were a bit less risky. The main surprise was that we had climbed a lot higher and further than we had thought, which meant the descent took much longer than we thought!

However, thanks to the early start we had, we had got out ahead of most other hikers, and so we saw some great wildlife, from birds of prey, to marmots to what we initially named an alpine caribou but turns out is actually called a chamois.

On the way down, we met a lovely French couple half way through their hike with a very cute corgi called Pinot. Anyone who says that corgis can’t manage long hikes or big scrambles clearly needs to meet Pinot because he was a very determined, energetic pup who was not going to be left behind.

We returned to our car about 8 hours after we had set out, and were very grateful to sit down. Sadly, this meant that we had to eventually face real life and the preparation for our everyday jobs, but the accidental expert hike had given a very good procrastination of the best sort, the sort that feels productive even while it may not be!