The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

When you have chosen the place for your camp your first act must be to gather at once as much dry, large wood as you can find. The local customs in this matter are very liberal. Even if you are quite close to a village, no one grudges you the use of wood, and your only possible disturbance will come from the frontier guards if you are so foolish as to choose their neighbourhood, which, by the way, can only be the case if you encamp near one of the few chief crossings of the range. These may ask you questions and make trouble, not for your gathering of wood, but for their suspicion that you are smuggling.

The temptation to gather only small wood is strong. It always seems as though the branch you have chosen will be large enough to last for some hours. But a little experience of these fires will show you that nothing small enough for you to drag will be too large for your purpose. The eight hours or more during which you must feed the fire consume a great deal of wood, and the keeping of the fire in depends upon having large logs for its foundation. You will not, of course, be able to cut these into the right length, you will have so to arrange them when the fire is once well started that they burn through their middles. You can then, later, shift into the centre of the flame the halves that fall aside. If there is any breeze pile a few stones to windward of your hearth, for you will have to sleep to leeward of the fire, and an arrangement of this kind will break the force of the wind and prevent the smoke and flame from coming too near you. If the wind is too strong, you must make your fire and your camp under the lee of some great rock, or it will both burn out in a very short time and make itself intolerable to those who depend upon it for warmth. For a wind that rises in the middle of the night, you have, of course, no remedy; short of heavy rain it is the worst accident that can befall you. If you have enough wood make your fire of a crescent shape with the hollow towards the wind. It is the warmest and the best way. You must so arrange that in sleeping you lie with your feet towards the fire, and your great provision of wood must be brought quite close to hand otherwise, most certainly, you will not have the energy to feed it in the few wakeful moments of the night. That wood should be somewhat green or wet matters little if you have a great fire well started, but if you let it get low while you sleep, it will be impossible to revive it, and when the fire fails, there is an end to sleep for every one. It is impossible to say what the effect of such a fire is by giving reasons for it; it does not perhaps warm one so much as do something to the air which makes sleep possible and easy without a shelter, and it is the universal aid and solace of all the Pyrenean mountaineers, whom you will often find in groups, woodcutters or shepherds, gathered round one of these great blazes for the night.

The conditions of a good rock shelter, of a neighbouring stream and plenty of wood, though common, are not universal, and if from the structure of the hills and from the nature of the map you fear you will not reach one, or if the greater part of the afternoon is passed without your finding such a place, your next choice must be a spot in one of the great woods that everywhere clothe the range. They are more common upon the French than upon the Spanish slope. Here there is always cover from the wind, for they are very dense, and even a partial cover from the rain, but it is important to make your fire in a clearing, and luckily there is nearly always a succession of open spaces between the forest and the stream. With such a fire and with such an arrangement to leeward of it the Pyrenean blanket with which you have provided yourself will be ample covering for the night.

As for using cabanes, I have already said that there is no grudge felt against you for doing so, but you must treat any man coming upon you in such a shelter as though he were the owner, for the local shepherds will certainly regard you as their guest, and will think they are doing you the favour of a host. Moreover, your fire, if you make one here, must be lit outside the building, though the local people who use the cabanes most constantly, will often make it inside. On the whole the night is more comfortably spent in the open than in one of these shelters, unless one is caught by rain.

The open sandy spaces such as are quite common by the side of the larger streams may be used with safety. There are no places where a spate will be so rapid as to endanger one, unless one choose, as a companion and I were once compelled to choose, a cave almost cut off by the water. The only places where it is essential that one should not camp, are the higher flats where wood is rare, and where the cold of the night is exceptionally severe. It is a choice to which one is often compelled, if one pushes on too long, after having miscalculated the fatigues and duration of the climb; but it is an error which one always regrets.

A further recommendation is, not to camp by the map. The map may look like [that on p. 131], and one may say that one will follow up the stream at one’s leisure. The reality may turn out a series of ascending precipices, quite unassailable.

But it is a great temptation. A man may have known the Pyrenees and experienced time and again the error of trusting to a map for a camping site, but there is something so convincing about the print and the colours that after years of experience one may commit the same folly again. It was but this year that, trusting to the 1/100,000 map, I planned to camp at the place where the Cacouette falls into the main stream below Sainte Engrace. I did not know the spot; it seemed to come at a convenient hour in the ascent of the mountains: I should be there about 5 o’clock. There was wood marked, good water; it was on the lee side of the wind that was then blowing from the south. When I came to it the place was a sharp ledge of limestone higher than Cheddar cliffs, dotted here and there with trees and affording between the wall of rock and the water not three feet of ground. It was not to be approached from above; it could not be reached from below. A more impossible place for camping never was. I had the same experience some years ago on the Aston, though that was before I knew the Pyrenees well. There a place was chosen by my companion and myself for its mixture of wood and meadow upon the map, there were cabanes and apparently plenty of good water; it was so plain on the map, that one did not hurry to reach it before darkness; but when we got there it was a marsh; no cabane appeared until daylight, and there was even that very rare thing in the Pyrenees, doubtful water. As for the wood that should have dotted the pasture, it turned out to be tough little live bushes, and all green, that would neither cut nor burn.

There is one last and very grave danger of which I would warn the reader in connexion with travel on foot in the Pyrenees, with a map and even with a map and a compass. Without map or compass it is more than a danger, it is a sort of necessary misfortune perpetually attending men, and the gravity of it is proved by the fact that the local people who use neither compass nor map when they go into a district with which they are unacquainted, carefully ask the marks of the path and get themselves accompanied, if they can, by someone who knows the country-side. This danger may be called “Getting into the wrong valley.”