Losing some swagger
One last look at Villafranca del Bierzo, from the “non-scenic route.”
It’s taken me a couple days to both process and recover from the hike down the mountain on Wednesday.
It wasn’t necessarily the miles (7.5) or the height of the descent (roughly 3,000 feet). It wasn’t even entirely the terrain, although if you can imagine a rock slide that left behind rocks the size of bricks and cinder blocks and assorted loose gravel with gullies carved out by rain, you have a pretty good sense of what the path looked like. I didn’t stop to take a photo because that would have meant letting go of my trekking poles, and there was no place to step away from the path to take a photo.
It was mostly the sense that there was no choice — once you took those first fateful steps on the rock path, you were committed and there was no way out. Added to that was the question of just how long the steep rocky descent continued (all the way to Molinaseca), the fear of injury on the rough terrain, and the lack of any reasonable stopping points, and it was a grueling harsh day.
Yesterday and today we visited with other pilgrims about that hike and their view of it was the same: the sense that there was no way out, the fear of injury, the lack of places to rest.
Yes, we are all now part of a fairly small group of people who can say that they successfully made that downhill trek. But in the back of my mind, I’m wondering if we really gained anything from the experience. Certainly it has shaped my attitude toward the remaining hikes and not necessarily in a positive way.
Today’s stage, for example, included an alternate route that involved a 950 foot ascent and descent. It was the more scenic route, but when I realized that the other route did not have an ascent, I didn’t even consider the alternative. I’m already worrying about tomorrow’s ascent to O Cebreiro and Sunday’s descent from Fonfria.
I’ve lost my hiking swagger and I want it back.
The cows are back! The deeper we go into the mountains, the more livestock we see. Today’s sightings included donkeys, cows, sheep and horses.
Although we’ve been dodging evidence of the horseback riding pilgrims on the trail, today’s the first day we actually saw someone on horseback. It’s one of the more popular ways of getting up the mountain to O Cebreiro. The horse-rental place is just across the street from our hostel.
We passed this statue today. Rich’s comment: “No wonder my feet hurt.” According to my metric conversion app, 559 kilometers is 347 miles.