LOS TRE S
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SIERRA NEVADA
E S MILES David Lintern traverses the 3,000m peaks of the Spanish Sierra Nevada WORDS AND PHOTOS DAVID LINTERN
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SIERRA NEVADA IT’S A FUNNY PLACE to start our journey, the Puerto de la Ragua. Out of season ski resorts are absent-minded places at the best of times, and this one is overpoweringly pine-scented, as if someone has spilled air freshener. The slightly surreal beginning is also the end of two disorientating days on the move; through the crumbling, sweating concrete of Malaga, and the sleepy spa town of Lanjaron, half empty with farmers, tourists and old ladies. Slightly travel sick from winding roads I’m happy to pour myself from our taxi, but rather less so to shoulder a pack groaning with seven days’ food and five litres of water. We bid our farewells to local guide Richard Hartley and aim slowly for the rolling ground above the treeline.
We’ve been deposited at 2,000m, but to me, whose trips away in recent years have been almost entirely UK-based and snatched in between childcare, it may as well be the moon. Los Tres Miles translates literally as ‘the three thousand’. There are three main variants of this trek, all of which include up to thirty 3,000m peaks. The traditional route traverses the Sierra Nevada range north-east to south-west, using shepherds’ and hunters tracks to bridge the watershed. Richard has two more suggestions: one that begins from Trevelez on the south side, a five-day trip with simpler logistics for those flying in from Malaga, and the Integral, which adds two days on an altiplano – a high plain – to create a substantial seven-day, 90km trek with 4,730m of ascent. This was the option
that had captured my imagination. The complete Sierra Nevada range, in a week – a red rag to a Spanish bull.
Hazy days
We crest the first bump, and then another two at a steady pace, in and out of steamy clouds, before a serrated edge unwinds into the heat haze. Distance is hard to fathom, and with no acclimatisation, the first day’s traverse is exhausting. The availability of water is also a real concern, hence the deadweight of our packs. Underfoot is a weird desert tundra. Spiky cactus grass pokes through the mesh in our trail shoes and stubby tussocks break the rhythm of our steps. Penny-sized black beetles clamber awkwardly between the scrub, flightless crickets (endemic to the range)
[pervious page] The eastern plateau, aka ‘the thirst traverse’! [above] Mick taking in the superb position on the Vasar de Mulhacen
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lazily suck moisture from their spines. It’s awkward going, but alien and spectacular. We are traversing unfinished topographic business, riding the jagged rim of a huge north-facing escarpment whose snowmelt feeds the delta of the Moorish city of Granada and its surrounding pueblos. I’m at breaking point on the final big climb of the day, a desiccated mess. It’s a bit like Helvellyn on the top, reckons Mick, in between my melodramas. Later still, we scan the horizon for blind, shallow gullies, one of which eventually produces a spring, before finally pitching at dusk as the cloud swims up from the sea. Fetching water entails a 100m descent, but any is better than none. The following day, and it is Mick’s turn to suffer. My body seems to have remembered how to backpack, thankfully. We roll with
the punches together, up and down, all the time travelling west. The character of our mesa para dos changes, becoming ever more like the tor-strewn plateau of the eastern Cairngorms, but at twice the altitude. Brittle, sandy rock shimmers in the heat haze, lime green dwarf cactus perches on top. We bypass a large herd of goats and spy the first of many Ibex. We make good time and at the Puerto de Trevelez, where the desert section ends and the 3,000m tops begin, we decide to push on, making for a magnificent camp in a high coire, at the Laguna de Juntillas. As the route swings south-west to follow the spine of the range, journeying between camps at the head of rivers now becomes the pattern for the remainder of the traverse. Our last task before sleep is to pack away our
food into Tupperware boxes, weigh them with rocks and station them away from the tents, overlooked by an ultrasonic motion sensor to deter determined critters that we’re told will tear through tents. This is the Hoyo del Zorro – the place of the fox.
Light and sound
The next two days are a blur of uncharacteristically bad weather and navigational near-misses. Early next morning the ridge thins to a blocky talus that reminds us of the Carn Mor Dearg arête and absorbs our energies and attention, before a prolonged hail storm trashes our holiday mood. Hungry, shivering and soaked through, we teeter along, on and off the ridge, catch a brief glimpse of the first and possibly the
This was the route that had captured my imagination: the complete Sierra Nevada range, in a week – a red rag to a Spanish bull
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As the route swings south-west to follow the spine of the range, journeying between camps at the head of rivers now becomes the pattern for the remainder of the traverse
[above] Last light at camp, after the trek from Mulhacen [above right] Posing young Ibex
finest of the Sierra Nevadan Three Peaks, or Tres Picos – Alcazaba – before what can best be described as an ‘exploratory’ descent to our next camp. That evening, cannons fire in the distance, and lightning bounces around obliquely on the rocks above us in a way that suggests other wandering hill vagrants are lost in the knee-bothering cubist maze we descended into a few hours earlier. It is all a trick of the night. We see no-one at all for the first four days of Los Tres Miles.
Richard told us about the Paso de las Zetas, a shepherd trod which handrails the massive eastern headwall of Alcazaba, before allowing passage onto its broad south slopes, and it sounded so perfect that we remain wedded to the idea, despite the continuing dreich. We scratch around for the improbable, elevated terrace for the whole of the following morning in a soupy drizzle. Our eventual success is short-lived. Through the murk, it seems to lead to…
nothing much at all. Just a steep, exposed bank of loose scree. We contour, one step forward, three down. Hell Hiking. Thinking I can see a lighter patch in the headwall to our right, I drop my pack and finally find the chink in Alcazaba’s armour we are looking for. We grind up and over the top in truly Scottish conditions and spend a night among cowpats at a saturated col. The dynamic of through hiking means decisions are made for the whole, not the part. You push on when you might prefer
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SIERRA NEVADA
TREKKING THE 3,000M PEAKS OF THE SIERRA NEVADA
Los Tres Miles is usually undertaken between May-September, as a five- to seven-day trek. Transport: Regular services to Malaga from Ryanair and the other usual suspects, from London, Manchester and Edinburgh. From there, hire car is probably the cheapest option to get into the Alpujarra foothills. It’s an A-B traverse – arrange transfers locally or through the guiding company Spanish Highs (see right).
Guides and guidebooks: Spanish Highs (spanishhighs.co.uk ) is the local, English-speaking guiding company who know the area intimately. Richard Hartley and his partner Kiersten have lived in the Sierra Nevada since 2003, and run guided traverses of Los Tres Miles, employing local Spanish, English and German speaking guides.
Where to stay: Lanjaron is a good base, with plenty of local hotels to choose from and supermarkets to stock up on perishables before you leave. The local food and wine is great.
We used Richard’s Cicerone guidebook, Walking and Trekking in the Sierra Nevada, which covers the seven-day ‘Integrale’ as well as the shorter, five-day route from Trevelez.
How hard? In summer conditions, Los Tres Miles is a high alpine trek. We found the full Integrale to be physically strenuous and sometimes vertiginous, but not technically difficult – scrambling sits at around Grade 1. It’s not the Alps; paths can be faint or non-existent and there’s almost no signage. Mountain huts are more like bothies, so you need to carry all your food.
Mapping: The map to get is the 1:40,000 Sierra Nevada Parque National by Editorial Penibetica, which covers the entire range (double sided). The level of detail is fairly good, but the paper it’s printed on will not survive your trip intact! mapsworldwide.com/maps-chartsatlases-c1811/walking-hiking-maps-c1814/ sierra-nevada-national-park-west-la-alpujarramarquesado-del-zenete-map-p15590
anything but. I’ve come to love the ebb and flow of these journeys, and of course it makes the changes of fortune, when they come, all the more welcome. The following morning I sit and eat my porridge while Mick doses in his tent. Sun – yes, sun – softly pulses, slowly over the back of Alcazaba, a few inches at a time towards the gear laid out to dry… before enveloping our shelters, surrounded by riverlets, as small orangebreasted Rock Thrushes dart about from rock to rock. The Great Outdoors Spring 2019 67
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SIERRA NEVADA The summit of mainland Spain
The Vasar de Mulhacen is our next pinch point, a traverse across the north face of mainland Spain’s highest mountain. Nervously, we descend a few metres from the col and onto a shattered balcony. Is this it? The Vasar is barely there at all, but once again, there is a way through this chaos of rock, however improbable. Cutting a line from one col to another, it seems to place us almost inside the mountain. This is the stuff of a thousand youthful adventure stories – maximum vertigo with only moderate jeopardy! The mountain’s east ridge is a slog but easier with our packs left at its foot. A return
visit for me after nearly two decades, but a first for Mick. Meanwhile, cloud swirls around voluminously on the north side of the range but strays no further. There is little reason to head back into it, so we join the rough track winding between Mulhacen and the third giant of Sierra Nevada, Veleta, before camping at the head of the Rio Seco. A blissfully clear, dry night and beautiful light at both dusk and dawn, but we soon have our heads back in the clouds. There is more navigational machismo on Cerro Macho, then a very brief section of via ferrata onto Valeta, slightly disappointing and besmirched by ski infrastructure. We have one last decision to make, one
more crux if we want it: the traverse of the Tajos de Virgens. Mick wavers – we are both tired – and then capitulates. Right on cue, thunder booms as we begin; it is engaging, exhausting, thirsty work. Everything we could have hoped for. And of course, Mick leads the route across the outward sloping rocks without a second thought, and the rock stays dry, as I potter along behind, fretting about when to put my camera away. “I should learn to stop missing out on things” he says later. Too true, I think, we should all say yes more. Mountain travel reminds us to get out of our own way. We camp once more at the head of a river, this time the Rio Lanjaron. I relish
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how these gentle camps punctuate the more formal grammar of our busy days on the rock. Richard tells us later that the water from the spring takes seven years to reach his home town. Our last full day lies up above, terminating in our final 3,000m peak, sitting like some kind of supranatural egg on the horizon. This river’s source seems to me to be a deeply resonant place – literally a well of life. Late the next morning, more exploratory scrambling takes us up to the Tajos Altos, a snaking broken-toothed jumble of a ridge that here in Spain is merely an exit from the range, but which would have a top ten reputation back in the UK.
That night we limp into the Casa Tello, a derelict forestry station slowly being absorbed back into the land. After a week of austere angles and smashed schists, the contrast of damp earth, busy insects, colourful flowers and heady herbs is overwhelming. Good God, there are even blackberry bushes. All that and now this too, packed hard into a week – what a compact and sustained adventure it had been. I don’t bother with my tarp, setting up my bivi bag under a tall Cedar. Cicadas thrum, branches sway in the saline breeze. It is time to go down to the town, and I suppose I am ready to concede to that. All I really want though, is to shower, resupply and carry on.
A PHOTOGRAPHIC TOUR
David Lintern will be returning to the Sierra Nevada this June to lead a six-day photographic trek following the Los Tres Miles route. Accompanied by local guide Richard Hartley, the aim is to visit at a time of year when the weather is more stable and focus on the photographic potential. The route will avoid the more vertiginous sections, visiting snow tunnels, alpine lakes and meadows, and plenty of summits. Planned highlights include Alcazaba for sunset, and a traverse of the north face of Mulhacen (as described in the feature). For more information and to book a place, please visit: www.davidlintern.com/ tuition-sierra-nevada/
Dawn on the Raspones de Rio Seco
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