The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

A third rule is, stick to the path, and if the path seems lost, cast about for it with as much anxiety as you would for a scent.

I have already said in speaking of the use of maps in the Pyrenees, that the great advantage of the 1/100,000 map was the clear way in which it marked the paths. The idea of paths does not fit in very well with the wild life which the Pyrenees promise one as one reads of them at home, and it is of importance to know what a Pyrenean “Path” is, and why such tracks are essential to travel in these mountains.

It is perfectly true that if you are going to camp and fish, or ramble about certain small districts for your pleasure, the point is unimportant, but if you are making a journey from one place to another, upon a set itinerary, a very little experience in the mountains will show you that a “path” must be known and followed, nor do the inhabitants of these hills, whose experience is based upon so many centuries, underestimate the value of these slight and sometimes imperceptible tracks. On the contrary, you will hear one of the mountaineers carefully indicating to some fellow of his, who has not yet made a particular crossing, how to find and keep the path. You do not hear him giving general indications of scenery, nor distant landmarks, but particular directions as to how the path may be made out in passages where it is difficult to trace.

The reason that these tracks are essential to Pyrenean travel lies in that formation of the hills which I have already often mentioned, a formation which causes them to be broken everywhere with sharp descents of rock down which no man can trust himself, and many of which are overhanging precipices. It also lies in the peculiar complexity of the tangled ridges so that not even with a good map and a compass can you be certain of guessing your way from one high valley into another.

Now the interest of these paths is that they are not, as the mention of them suggests to one unacquainted with these mountains, definite and continuous. Even the most frequented of them have difficulties of two kinds. The first difficulty is the crossing and multiplicity of tracks as one approaches a pasture, the second is the loss of the way over certain kinds of soil.

Wherever people go to cut wood, or to lead their flocks on to enclosed fields known to them, a divergent path appears and it is often difficult to tell the main path from the branch one. Save over very well-known ports these paths are not made-ways; they are never mended or laid down, they are but the marks left by travel which is sometimes that of but one man on foot in a week, and that man shod in soft and yielding sandals that leave little impress. For many months in the year these faint traces are covered with snow, and in early summer they are soaked in the melting of it. No money is voted for them, and if here and there the crossing a rivulet or the getting past a difficult corner of rock has been artificially strengthened, this will only be upon the main ways and usually only near the villages. A Pyrenean path is the vaguest of things: it is a patch of trodden soil here and there, a few worn surfaces of rock, then perhaps a long stretch with no indication whatsoever. Yet upon this chain of faint indications with only occasional lengths marked, your life depends; and the finding and picking of it up has the same sort of interest and excitement as the following of a scent or a spoor.

There are three kinds of soil over which the path is almost invariably lost. The first is swampy land, the second is any broad stretch of clean grass, the third is scree.

Loss in swampy land is rare, for the simple reason that the path avoids such land; loss on scree is often made good towards the end of the summer by the passage of men and animals whose treading down of the loose stones can be noticed from place to place, but intervals of grass are most baffling. The native knows where to pick up the track again upon the further side; the foreigner has no chance but to guess, from the last direction it took, where he is likely to find it again. He will almost invariably be wrong, and then he must cast about in circles until he finds it upon the further side of the pasture, entering a wood or picking its way between gaps of rock. There is a lacuna of this sort on the perfectly easy way up the Peyréguet, and it cost me last year three valuable hours; for easy as the Peyréguet is—and it is little more than a plain walk—if you get too much to the right of it, there is a slope on the further side that a goat could not get down.

So much for the importance of Paths in the Pyrenees. It is a point very difficult to make in print, but one which the reader, if he intend to walk there, will do well to take on faith. Make the 1/100,000 map your infallible authority, don’t expect to find on the black line it gives—especially if it is a dotted line—more than the merest string of indications, often separated by very wide gaps, and regard the discovery and continuity of these indications as vital to your safety.

I now turn to equipment.