Day One. The Durance Valley to Refuge Furfande (2293m)via Col du Moussière (2354m), Col Garnier at (2279m) 14.5 miles, 2358m A, 1000m D
Bizarrely this our first ever Nordic Pole Trek started from an Airbnb run by a Nordic Walking Champion! David Deguelle, and his lovely other-half, Sophie organise a number of Nordic Walking related activities, which may tick some boxes if you’re interested in being helped by a man at the top of his game. Have a look at their website (it’s in French).
He’s also a qualified mountain guide, and works for the French Tourist Board
Over a shared supper that evening Favourite Wife discovered that like her he makes his own energy balls. Now I’m a man who despises anything that smatters of orthorexia, but these things are actually remarkably good, and oh so very good for you!
Oh ok, so you want the recipe, I’ll see whether she will reveal it to you dear reader – watch out for another post.
How not to start Nordic Walking
After a delightful supper with mine hosts I carried our bags up the long flights of steps to a very cosy wood-panelled room, decorated with David’s Nordic Walking Cups and various relics of alpine sport.
At some point in the carrying I twisted or pulled I don’t know what, but it hurt, big-time. I become one of those rather stiff looking early robots, you know the type, rigid body, with rigid arms and legs, single direction joints, and necks that turn slowly and mechanically.
After popping sufficient painkillers, sleep came but fitfully. Unable to climb out of bed next morning, I resorted to sliding sideways until I could get onto my knees, and thence to stand. “I’ll be fine in a few minutes” I said, with absolutely zero conviction.
First steps in the Alps.
Miraculously within a mile my back was fine.
Our day could be divided into three, with the first section starting with my stubborn determination to follow what on the map (IGN 3537 ET) appeared to be a track, but turned out to be a ‘force your way through rain soaked saplings and bushes and see how wet you can get’.
We retraced our steps and crossed a sturdy military style footbridge taking the pleasant steady walk (suggested in the first place by Favourite Wif)e, by the River Guil that flowed strongly and loudly with light-blue mid-summer meltwater.
We turned up through gently undulating fields, scattered with fruit trees, to the village of Eygliers
We took long draughts of water from the village spring and topped up our water supplies.
The way wound wearily upwards along the road, with the ground rising a metre or so on either side. We passed scattered houses, gardens alight with irises, there was even a small museum of local agriculture.
We went wrong once again and were wrongly re-directed by a charming lady from the village, who abandoned her car in the road to gesticulate directions in Franglais.
Goodbye urbanisation, hello civilisation.
Stage two started when we reached La Coin and joined the Gr 58.
Farmland and houses traded places for pine trees and meadows, the latter dying out as we ascended in a long traverse, again losing track of where we were. The forest was hot and dry, the sunny patches occupied with a variety of butterflies including the beautiful Snow Appolos.
It eventually dawned on yours truly that rather than using ViewRanger to simply record our track and it’s details, we could locate ourselves using the GPS – duhh!
The pain commences
We came to a point in the now unbroken forest when the track shrivelled, turned, and started to climb rather more seriously, the sort of track that was one minute obvious, the next a total mystery, to the point that I started to feel like Winnie the Pooh going around and around searching for the Woozle (if you’ve not read it, it’s wonderful, even for adults). The early-afternoon sun was beating down with fiery determination, and we were discovering that our fears of being too unfit were based upon reality. Ahead lay one of the steeper ascents.
We followed the track steeply up the side of the valley, climbing across ravines filled with boulders and shattered tree trunks, quite capable of turning an ankle. My back pain, traded places with my quadriceps which protested to the point of locking.
Rounding a corner we were faced with a sheer cliff, down which slid water, part sheet, part waterfall, around which accumulated hoards of small grey blue butterflies, their uncurled probisces sucking the moisture and salts from the saturated earth, flitting away to be replaced by others. We cooled our faces and left the butterfly party.
Too late for lunch.
It was mid-afternoon before we came to the treeline, taking shelter in the last remnant of shade, we took lunch – realising that we should have stopped earlier.
It is all very well snacking off energy bars, but there comes a point when the soul as well as the body needs feeding. Not simply sustenance, but the celebration of food, but celebration. We’d bought a loaf that morning, dark-brown deeply scented sourdough scattered with walnuts. Hacking off chunks of heaven with my Swiss Army knife, we dded the remainder of smoked-salmon we’d bought from Mr Greenslade in Salisbury Market, oh yes and hard-boiled eggs.
Now an aside: hard-boiled eggs are a great part of a picnic, but do peel them before you pack them. Many years ago I was skiing my first moguls, stopped at the bottom for lunch, and there in the pre-‘everything is plastic’ paper bag lunch pack was a hard boiled egg displaying a crack for each and every fall on those cursed bumps. Twas a crunchy pasty!
Col du Moussière (2354m)
Somewhat fortified we continued over the brow of a hill, to the first col of our Trek, the Col du Moussière (2354m).
This remains a standalone memory, we had ascended the vertiginous valley wall, followed a fairly gentle approach to the col, but there it all changed.
The scene before us was straight from The Lord of The Rings; staring out across an empty world of peaks and arete’s, underpinned by cliffs and towers with vermicelli-like scree at their base. Below us lay a couple of hundred metres of scattered boulders, looking for all the world like the remnants of an ammunition dump left by some giant who inhabited these parts in times gone by. The rank smell of troll was almost tangible.
This crossing of the first col was the start of section three. The little patches of grass and snow accumulated between the boulders, introduced us to the multitude of alpine flora, gentians, viola, saxifrage, and numerous others whose variety is still a mystery. Overall I counted 330 varieties of wild flower in the two weeks, many of which I had never seen before.
“Would we survive a night in a bivvy-bag”
Looking across at the ‘blasted heath’ our thoughts, mine unspoken, turned to the distance ahead, the lateness of the day and the downs and ups and downs to come. The path fell away below us, beautiful to those with energy, mindblowingly depressing to those for whom energy and emotional strength had seeped unstoppably onto the track we had plodded.
We spent a number of those hours contemplating whether our night would in fact be spent wrapped in the emergency blankets we carried. Favourite Wife who was in agony from knee pains, and was casting doubts about our survival hopes. And then there were the wolves that might show interest.
Having finally attained the Col du Moussière the scenery had became wild and stunning, but our timing was also wildly and stunning out. The Lac du Lauzet, described in the Cicerone Guide as a good lunch or was it elevenses? spotlit just how much we were out, we came to it in the early evening!
The health benefits of bathing your feet.
Lac du Lauzet was the first body of water we encountered, and we knew that a few minutes of bathing would reduce our swollen feet – a real benefit all round.
Being over-fussy about precisely where we bathed our tired feet we missed the route and were a mile, and two hundred metres lower in altitude when I discovered the error. Entirely my fault, I was leading this show, and had failed to read the map.
Tiredness compounded by fear of telling Favourite Wife that we had to retrace our steps led me to the decision to abandon Col St Antoine (2458m) for Col Garnier (2279m), another mistake. Why a mistake? Because although the Col’s altitude was less, we actually had to drop down the valley a couple of miles and then regain the lost metres.
The worlds most voracious mosquitoes.
The final hundred metres or so up to Col Garnier were plagued by the most voracious species of mosquito, four foot wingspan, jabbers at least a foot long, laughing openly at the ‘all-purpose-drive-them-off-the-planet mosquito repellant’ that we applied. Typical females (the males don’t bite), never read the instructions! (OK so it’s an outrageous generalisation, but most of my Favourite Wimmin don’t read the instructions on most things, and I know female mosquitoes don’t!)
Passing over the Col my heart sank, stretching down and away, the path led around the head and shoulders of a valley which dropped steeply down to where a glacier had once lived. Favourite wife, exhausted and demoralised and in considerable pain, looked at the buildings, widely scattered along the far shoulder of the valley, in the fading light, and asked for confirmation that our refuge for the night was the furthest, and we are talking several miles. She was right, but I was not man enough to admit it.
How to walk when your legs have died.
Those final miles were covered at barely a walk, more like a stagger, but Favourite Wife made it look so much more than that, brave faced and determined as ever, she drove on.
The technique is pole plant after pole plant, still putting in that final backward thrust that carries you forward in a way that trekking poles fail to. But the prequel to that is preparation, building up endurance in the months and weeks before, good nutrition – before and during, and sleep. Did you know that most of your REM sleep comes in the final hours of the eight you are advised to take? (Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker)
The route fell away below us around the head of the one glacier filled valley, the way becoming almost as much stream as path, with springs appearing every few yards. Earlier in the day this excess of water and the amazing plants and moss would have been enchanting, to us they were a precursor to the Tolkeinesque ‘Passage of the marshes’.
The track swung around to the north side of the valley climbed steeply for a short while before traversing past chalets set on the hillside, some inhabited, others shut and dark.
The sun was bestowing goodnight-kisses of gorgeous orange on the peaks to the south-east. We lifted our heavy tired legs and pushed with our poles the final distance towards the refuge that was rumoured to lie ahead beyond the repetitive rising and falling of the narrow way.
The refuge, which had remained hidden from view for the past couple of miles, appeared in the fading light, windows glowing gently. We were welcomed by other trekkers, replete and content from their supper of two hours gone by. I’d called ahead a couple of times to say we were alive – if barely kicking, and they had kept supper for us.
In fairness to the Cicerone Guide it warned that the climb to the first col was a long and strenuous one, but it exceeded our expectations, several times helpful locals pointed us in the wrong direction to join the GR541.
Refuge de Furfande 2293 m
We had walked 14.5miles and ascended 2358m (7721 ft in old money), descended 1000m and were two and a half hours late for supper at our first stay- Refuge de Furfande (2293m).
A warning must sadly be attached to the otherwise fabulous Refuge Furfande. Despite booking some weeks in advance and telling them that Favourite Wife is vegetarian, we were served a dish of sausage lying on a bed of potatoes – they suggested she have the potatoes! On our final night of the tour, we stayed again. We had to pay an eight Euro supplement for FW to have an omelette rather than pork curry, why did they ask when I booked if she ate fish?
That first night I discovered why the option of a red light on your head torch is so good- my Pretzl, great and rather ancient as it was, only had (it died last autumn, thus ‘had’ rather than ‘has’) a bright to very bright white option. Favourite Wife’s ‘cheapy’ from Blacks had red – so much more dormitory friendly in the middle of the night! (unless trying to deal with the aforementioned snorer) A new head-torch with red light is on my ‘have to have list’. Having arrived so late we were engulfed in darkness when the generator went off at ten fifteen, and had to search the dormitory for a couple of mattresses unoccupied by sleeping slumberers, my searchlight received a few annoyed grunts.
Unsavoury bedroom habits – snoring.
It’s quite impossible to stop a determined snorer snoring without resorting to dynamite or some other sort of ‘accidental death’. You can try a bucket of snow-water first, but that’s not guaranteed to work.
There are a few tricks to try. A loud cough is often sufficient to make them turn over, or getting-up to go to the loo followed by the accidental torchlight focussed on their face as you try to find your bunk again. Followed of course by the mad rush to get back to sleep before they start again.
But let’s face it, at the end of the day it might just have to be the dynamite.