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“A
DAY IN THE MOUNTAINS”
©Geoff
Husband
Every
cyclist has a “The best day ever” in their catalogue of cycling
memories. The day may be chosen for views, people they’ve met, a special
achievement or even overcoming adversity. This is our best day - why? I
can’t rightly tell, maybe a combination of all the above, but I know we
will never forget our first day “in the mountains”.
Kate was about 15 meters ahead, hair streaming, knees and elbows
tucked in. A quick glance at the speedo shows 35 mph. Then braking hard
for a hairpin, brakes squealing then cranking the bike hard over, further
and further, nothing scrapes, then upright again. The road dropping
steeply away, 1 in 5 at a guess. Ahead of me Kate tucks down and lets out
a whoop of excitement. 35, 40 , 43, I wear glasses but my eyes are
streaming, Kate is a watery blur ahead, 46, 48, can I make 50? The bike
gently shakes its head as if in answer and I sit up and let Kate go. 20
minutes of wild descent has made us confident in our brakes and tyres, but
I have front panniers and, I suspect, a healthier sense of danger. I catch
her up 5 minutes later as the hill gently flattens, her hair a mess and a
huge grin on her face. “Brilliant!”, she shouts, and we pull up at the
side of the road and catch our breath. Our rims are too hot to touch and
the tarmac is melting under the searing Spanish sun, but we are both cold.
Now I know why the riders on 'The Tour de France' stuff newspapers up
their shirts.
The day had started gently, a soft cool day in the little town of
Arrette where we had camped the night after a huge meal in the hotel in
the town. We were nervous - all the last day we had watched the mountains
getting larger and larger, dominating the horizon half way to the clouds.
The first time I had seen real mountains, I’d been walking in Snowdonia
in Wales, but these were giants. We were at 150 meters, the top of Col
Pierre-St. Martin pass was 1800 meters, a climb of over 5000 feet, with
little idea of what we would find on the other side - in Spain.
We had chosen this pass back in England six months before, as part
of the planning for our longest ever tour. 1400 kms of hard cycling later
we faced our biggest test. The two weeks it had taken us to get to this
point had hardened us up and a glance at the map all those months before
had shown us that the climb lasted for 25 kms, presumably giving a quite
manageable gradient of 1 in 15. So, we shook the early morning dew from
the tent, packed our panniers and set off as the sun rose.
How wrong can you be! We soon picked up speed and instead of
starting to climb we found ourselves cycling along a steep sided valley. 5
then 10 kms and still we didn’t climb. The mountains seemed to be
wrapping all around us, blotting out the sun.
Then a little bridge, through a tiny copse of trees, a quick right
hand bend and then we saw it. Like Jacob’s ladder, the road soared up in
front of us doing a passable impression of the side of a pyramid. Neither
of us said anything, there was a series of clatters as we both hit bottom
gear and we began to climb. I will never forget those first 400 yards, all
I could see was the tarmac directly below me as I “honked” in first
gear. I could see the veins in my eyeballs but blowed if I was giving up
now. I could hardly believe it, but the road actually steepened around an
outcrop of rock, then turned and levelled out slightly. I stopped, shaking
and gasping for breath, turned round and was stunned to see Kate grinding
up the hill not 20 meters behind me. She stopped and I grabbed a quick
snap of her. I have that photograph in front of me now, it is a picture of
exhaustion and despair. After she had gained enough breath she gasped,
“It’s no good, I’ll never make it”.
This was our nightmare, all this way and to fall at the first
major hurdle. Were we going to have to freewheel back with our tail
between our legs and find some easier way into Spain; i.e., a bus? We
rested for five minutes, had a cuddle, and I confessed that I was
exhausted too. We could only see a few hundred meters further up the road
as it wound its way up the mountain, but the gradient was certainly a
little less, “Lets give it a go,” said Kate and so we swung our legs
over our saddles and began to climb.
That easier slope made all the difference, and our super low
bottom gears allowed us to settle into a gentle rhythm with enough breath
left over to talk to each other. Some thoughtful soul had painted lines
across the road every km, presumably for some insane cycle race, and had
also marked the altitude. So as we climbed we had a good idea of how far
we had got, and this helped us pace ourselves.
Soon we left the treeline behind and saw the mountain stretching
ahead. Sheep grazed on the rough pasture in the distance - “wait a
minute - they’re not sheep they’re cows!”, suddenly the scale
changed and the mountain looked twice as big. I could hear the gentle
clanking of their bells echoing across the valley. Why were they clanking
in time to my pedalling? It wasn’t cow bells, it was my spokes making
pinging noises as I pressed on the pedals! A quick inspection showed
nothing amiss, but I listened with one ear for the snap of a spoke for the
rest of the climb.
Every couple of kms we stopped, had a rest and gazed speechless at
the scenery spreading before us. “There’s a chough, and another!”
These little crows pirouetted in front of us as if giving us our own
personal aerobatic display. The top of the mountain was lost in the
clouds, and below us we could see the tiny meandering road we had climbed
up.
Time to press on. The soft wet clouds engulfed us for a few
hundred meters then we emerged into brilliant sunshine, the top of the
mountain invisible behind the slope. “Nearly there”, a helpful km line
told us - we had only 800 meters to climb.
Round a hairpin, then there it was! The most ugly half built ski
resort you have ever seen, music blared from tinny speakers and a bar
looking like an office block advertised “steak frits”. We could have
wept. No mention on the map, it was too new. So this was to be the summit,
literally, of the day’s achievement. We succumbed and sat and munched
our dinner with an ice cold beer, we were the only diners. What else would
you expect at a ski resort in August?
The food revived us and there was a
little further to the summit, so we mounted our steeds and wound our way
from the monstrosity behind us. After 500 meters it was as if the ski
resort had been swept from the face of the Earth, we were at the top, that
thrilling descent to come. Behind us spread the green mountains of France,
ahead of us the Spanish border, marked by a tatty wooden barrier and
diligently “manned” by a very bored looking cow, not a human in sight.
Beyond that, Spain, baked hard brown, tiny dark villages, and many more
passes in the Cantabrian mountains, but for now we were happy after our
first day ‘in the mountains’...
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