On being handicapped in the big city

Nearly three weeks ago I fell while hiking in my favorite spot in Madrid, La Pedriza. We were busy exploring the far reaches of La Pedriza posterior when I stupidly tripped forward and felt a yank on my left arm as I hit the ground hard. When I brushed myself off, my shoulder was conspicuously lower than it normally is. Six hours later, after an intense thunderstorm and a careful three-hour descent in a makeshift sling, the shoulder had been returned to its rightful place by an ornery emergency room doctor.

And thus, with my left arm completely immobilized in a sling, I began a three-week stint as a persona discapacitada in Madrid. I’ve been commuting to work and more or less living my life as normal, to the extent that a one-armed person can. I have grown used to people staring and, especially, to the majority of people who don’t budge to give me a seat on any of the various modes of public transport I use daily.

There are always exceptions, though. Today, as I was riding on a city bus, one woman was especially solicitous, looking concernedly at me even after I declined the offer of her seat. As I approached the door to leave, she offered to help me off the bus (I had a small suitcase in tow) and, when I demurred, she leaned over and confided that her daughter currently has both arms in casts and she, to put it lightly, knows how it is. I, too, can say I’ll never look at physical incapacities the same way again.

Second impressions about Morocco

Morocco doesn’t deceive. It pleasantly surprises, reaffirms my belief in the fundamental goodness of humankind. It smiles, frequently. Laughs easily. Looks you in the eye when speaking. Is unhurried. Piles on motorbikes and weave through traffic, clad in sandals but not in helmets.

A glass of freshly squeezed orange juice is sold for what it’s worth — as little as 30 cents in Marrakesh and just one euro in a mountain hut. Toilets are uncomplicated — generally a pretty clean white hole and a bucket of water. Tea is the national drink. People both rise and go to bed early. This country knows what’s going on.

Discoveries made on this trip:

The town of Moulay Bousselham. Perched on a steep embankment overlooking a gorgeous long sandy beach, the town has one main street and no banks. It’s spitting distance from a lake that’s famous for its flocks of migratory birds, and thus has a handful of places to stay and two campgrounds. We loved its market lane, where we found delicious rolled bread snacks and jackknife clams fresh from the Atlantic at a price unthinkable in Spain.

Refuge du Toubkal (3,207 m / 10,521 ft). My experience in mountain huts is limited since I’m usually carrying a tent. But when you’re planning a significant ascent, huts offer a certain ease of mind. Almanzor’s Refugio Elola had been my most recent hut experience: surly caretaker, some not very nice holes in the ground for toilets, and too many rules. The Refuge du Toubkal was a welcome change. This hut seems to operate on the familiar Moroccan principle of organized chaos. At first glance things appear to be supremely disorganized and unregulated, but then everything sort of falls into place. The bathrooms were clean, rooms were big with lots of natural light, and there was a sort of pervasive good mood about the place, which in no doubt stemmed from the smiley, singing Moroccan staff under the direction of Ibrahim, tall and dark with a killer smile and a firm handshake. When the mountains’ shadows extended across the hut’s roof, the guests (Spanish, Italian, English, German, French …) piled into the dining room to play games, chat, and drink tea. In those very close quarters, people were cordial, climbing stories were exchanged, and pretension dissolved into the thin air.

It’s the simple things in life that are best. On our first evening in Morocco, we sat down in front of a café facing the 15th-century walls of Asilah and ordered mint tea. Deciding we were hungry, one of our group slipped across the street and bought a couple loaves of bread from a vendor and some fresh goat’s cheese from a man with a cart. That impromptu picnic tasted so good that we talked about it for the rest of the week. Now I wonder if it was the food and drink that was so delicious, or the combination of the eating and drinking, the sun setting on the city’s walls, and the feeling of empowerment that accompanies the start of any adventure.

I explain my reasons for posting about Morocco in a blog about Spain in my previous Morocco post.

Barrancos!

I had never even really heard of the sport Spaniards call barranquismo (canyoning or canyoneering in English) until I lived in Spain. But soon I found out enough about it to know that it was something I wanted to try.

Last weekend, four friends and I piled into a furgoneta with our guide and an experienced friend of his and headed to Huesca, the province of the Pyrenees in Aragón. In the next two days we journeyed through three different canyons near the southern part of Ordesa, one of the two Spanish national parks in the Pyrenees. Barranquismo consists of, essentially, the descent of a canyon with the natural obstacles this entails. It requires a fair amount of gear (see above photo): a full-body wetsuit with neoprene booties, a climbing helmet, a special harness with extra butt protection, boots or sneakers to wear over the booties, ropes, descenders, waterproof backpacks, lots of carabiners with webbing, etc etc. It’s the kind of activity that, unless you know someone with a lot of experience and/or equipment, you should do with a guide.

But don’t let this deter you! It is one of the coolest activities I’ve ever done. We rappelled tens of meters into pristine pools, slid down natural water slides, jumped off rocks into pools, swam under waterfalls, and waded through narrow canyons with moss-covered walls reaching high above us. My favorite was Garganta de las Gloces, and I found a video of some of the best parts of it. And this is another we did—Barranco del Furco—that shows some of the rappels.

Summer must in Madrid

[Swim in the Río Manzanares in La Pedriza.]

Almanzor, take two

This year we decided to go back for Almanzor, mountain a few friends and I attempted to climb a year ago. A snowy April in the Circo de Gredos, home to Almanzor, the Laguna Grande, and other beautiful rocky pinnacles, remains one of my favorite spots to be in all of Spain. And, I repeat, it’s just over two hours from Madrid.

Anyway, this year we were quite a large group of friends of friends and ex-lovers and so on: thirteen in all who walked up to the refugio Saturday afternoon. Fewer departed for the big peak early Sunday — in more snow and less water than last year — and in all we were seven who reached the narrow Portilla del Crampón, and stood there for a while in the whipping wind and rapidly increasing fog, surveying the ice-covered rock and not finding the anchor for the rope we wanted to mount. Below, on the other side of this frighteningly narrow “pass of the crampon,” the canales oscuras (dark channels) yawned their gaping mouths. With the deteriorating weather conditions, the nasty-looking ice, and pocas ganas to spend a while mounting the whole set-up to make sure we didn’t fall down into said depths, we decided to head down the very snowy ladder we had climbed.

To be honest, I was still on a high from having overcome last year’s fear and actually making it to the pass. The view (on both sides) was enough to leave you breathless, and looking down at what we’d come up, I wasn’t sure how we had done it, or how we would descend it. But we did. I don’t know if we’ll ever make the spring snow ascent of Almanzor, but I wouldn’t be opposed to keep trying.

Peñalara

As any Madrileño who loves the outdoors knows, we’ve got the mountains right in our backyard. Literally. In an hour by car, bus, or train, you can access some truly beautiful wild areas with fantastic hiking. I am a huge fan of La Pedriza, a natural area full of mounds of granite perfect for climbing and hiking. But a couple months ago, an adult student of mine piqued my interest when he recounted having spent part of his weekend attempting to climb Peñalara, the highest peak (2,430 meters) in the Sierra de Guadarrama, the mountain range closest to Madrid. This weekend, mi chico and I made our own attempt and succeeded.

You begin the ascent to Peñalara from the Puerto de Cotos, a mountain pass at 1,830 meters. It’s only an hour in car from the center of Madrid, and can also be reached by train. We didn’t have the highest hopes for our day–the INM predicted a 90% chance of rain and the sky was gray and threatening above as we began our uphill trek. Above the treeline, the wind began to whip against us with such a fury that I was afraid we’d be blown off the slope. But it didn’t rain. In fact, we noticed as we got higher, the wind was blowing the ugly rain clouds away from us and onto the plains of Castilla-León. So we reached the summit quickly (it’s a 600 meter ascent in a only a few kilometers) and continued on our loop down the other side of the summit and up a rocky pinnacle called Risco de los Claveles and down, down, down until we reached the first of several glacial lakes that would mark our return route.Soon enough we were walking through a meadow filled with wildflowers and flowing streams. Waterfalls cascaded from the rock walls below Peñalara, and the sun came out in a hole in clouds above us. We ate lunch by the lovely Laguna Grande before heading down the easy trail back to the car.

The circuit hike took us about four hours not including stops. Be forewarned that it’s extremely popular (like most of the Guadarrama). We had a lot of company on a day with relatively bad weather. That student of mine hadn’t made it to the top because of worse weather. A steward at the Laguna Grande told us that two years ago there were seven deaths on the peak due to winter unpreparedness. Best times to go are May, June, and September.

Almanzor

I spent last weekend in a beautiful snowy place just two hours from Madrid: the Sierra de Gredos. A friend invited me on an expedition to Almanzor, the highest peak in the Sistema Central, or the chain of mountains that crosses the Iberian peninsula from Lisboa to Valencia. Almanzor is 2592 meters tall, or 8501 feet, and my friend had been wanting to climb it for some time.

I knew nothing about the peak before he mentioned the trip, and I read a bit about it in the links he included in his emails. But for whatever reason, I didn’t fully digest the information. When, on our first day out, we arrived at Los Barrerones, a flat spot high above the Circo de Gredos (the Gredos Cirque), and my companions pointed out Almanzor — an amazingly beautiful peak, a rocky horn rising from the cirque — I thought, “How the hell are we going to get up that?”

It looked, for all means and purposes, like the Matterhorn. You know, one of those breathtakingly high peaks that you can’t even fathom how people climb. Much less you.

None of this is to say I am inexperienced in the mountains. I have spent plenty of time in the hills but, above all, climbing the 4,000 footers of the Adirondacks and completing long circuit hikes, like the Alps Haute Route and a circuit of the Torres del Paine in Chile. Ascending peaks in the winter is very different, especially when you have to use an ice ax and crampons and the vertical drops are enough to make your stomach flip.

We got a bit of a late start on Saturday morning from the Plataforma de Gredos, the parking lot that gives good access to the area. The original idea had been to walk to the refugio (about two and a half hours), drop off our heavier material (sleeping bags, extra clothes, etc.) and then continue up to the summit of Almanzor (another couple hours) before descending to a hot meal and bed at the refugio.

We arrived at the refugio sometime around three o’clock. After eating something and getting our gear ready to ascend, it was nearly four. Dinner would be served at eight. On the advice of several people sitting outside the refugio we decided to postpone our summit attempt to Sunday morning. We’d start early, the snow would still be hard, and we’d be well-rested. So we spent Saturday afternoon heading up the trail to Almanzor to practice with our crampons and ice axes.

But on Sunday the group was ready to give up: one member had awoken with a sore throat and another’s boots were completely soaked through. I couldn’t help thinking that it would be a real shame to not even give it a try. So I said that. The sore throater said he had no problem waiting several hours for us, so the remaining three departed uphill, over the snow-covered rocks, under a cerulean blue sky.

The landscape of this area is just fantastic. The refugio is situated at the southeastern end of the Laguna Grande, a beautiful lake (above) surrounded by the peaks of the cirque. It had been snowing the week before, so everything was covered in snow. But since the sun was shining all weekend, the snow got soft during the day and hundreds of little streams began running. One of the benefits of going in the winter is that there’s tons of water–and the sounds of it–everywhere. There are several waterfalls en route to the summit. In summer, apparently, it’s a bit of a rocky wasteland with not a drop of water in sight (except for what’s in the lake) and quite hot.

Shortly we were far beyond where we’d reached the previous afternoon, moving slowly and making sure that with each step the crampons and ice ax were in place. The trail just keep getting steeper and if I looked back, I started to fear the way down. One of my companions had commented on Saturday that she thought we had gotten quite far in our practice session. This was an illusion–it’s not much distance to the summit (a kilometer or two) but, from the refugio, you have to climb nearly 600 meters up in that distance.

Pretty soon we could see the Portilla del Crampón, the tiny pass one has to cross to reach the last pull to the summit. But there were still a hundred meters or more to that point. The vertical drop was making me really nervous, and I decided I’d had enough. Luckily, there was someone coming down and he didn’t mind at all having a little company on his descent. He calmed my nerves quite a bit and admitted that the mountain “está empinado” (is steep). The descent wasn’t nearly as harrowing as I imagined.

An hour after I returned to the refugio, the two who had headed on to the summit returned. They hadn’t summited, in part because one had lost feeling in his feet and also because they would have needed a rope to do the last bit. By the time we made it back to the car, we were exhausted and sunburned, but totally happy.

We’ll be back for you, Almanzor.