Nick and I woke up relatively late on the first full day of our El Chorro trip, and weren't really out of bed until 9:30 (sunrise was only an hour earlier, though). 9:30 in El Chorro, by the way, is 8:30 GMT and 3:30 EST (which I was on about 3-4 days prior to this), so I didn't feel that guilty. Excitingly, it got sunnier and sunnier between 8:30 and 9:30 (we kept hitting snooze), so that when we woke up it was clear that we would have good weather.
We ate breakfast (cereal with UHT milk, yum yum) at Finca, and then went down to Almona to figure out our plans for the day. It was a rest day for the Hampshire team, but Zeb and Luke were going to hike up to the crag with us so that Luke could do an hour of meditating and Zeb could stare at his project for an hour. First, though, Nick and I had to head to the tiny "supermarket" in town to get more lunch food and groceries.
Once we drove the 2-3 minutes into town, we realized that Nick's wallet was back up at Finca. We drive five minutes back up to Finca, pick up the wallet, and then drive five more minutes back into town. We find the shop, get groceries (lots of pointing -- my Spanish doesn't go much beyond "ocho"), and head back up to Almona where we stash our extra food for the day and pick up Zeb and Luke.
From there, we head uphill to the Escalera Arabe area. This area has a fairly long approach, particularly because there is a gate blocking the dirt road that takes us closer to the crag, so we park outside of the gate (although we then observe other people simply opening the gate, driving through, and closing it again -- it's not locked). On the walk, Nick notices the sparkly wasteband of Zeb's pants and comments, "They're not boy pants, are they." We then have to walk for at least half an hour up to near the crag, at which point it takes us a while to figure out which sector we're at.
We eventually figure out that we're near Sector Sergio, so Nick and I do two long, easy 6's and eat lunch (Zeb and Luke head out of sight over to their route-studying/meditation area). From there, Nick and I decide to head up to the Sector Arabesque because there is a 6a that shares anchors with a 7a face climb that Nick and I want to top rope. So we hike up the centuries-old "Arab Steps" to get over to that sector.
Nick starts up the 6a, but at the last bolt gets nervous. He claims that there is a solid 20-foot runout from there to the anchors, and the climbing isn't particularly easy. So he comes down, and I start loading myself up with bail biners and slings to go up and investigate bailing possibilities and texas rope trick possibilities. I'm only at the second bolt, though, when Zeb makes a return (Luke went back to the house rather than repeat part of the approach back up to where we were). So I immediately get Zeb to agree to fix it and lower off straight from the second bolt.
Zeb does fine leading it, although he did take his time moving past the sixth bolt to the anchor. He also helpfully puts a directional in so that we can easily try the next-door 7a as well.
Then Zeb belays me while I toprope the 7a, ultimately onsighting it (it's a nice face climb). Then Nick topropes the 7a (a couple hangs but he does it pretty well), while I belay and Zeb takes pictures of his shoes.
After this, we decide to head down because there are a couple hours of daylight left and Nick is dying to do the Caminito del Rey (which I have discussed earlier here). The Camino is an elevated pathway through the gorge that was built in the early twentieth century to allow dam workers easy access to areas they needed to get to. When the dam was opened in the 1920s, the King used the walkway to get to it during the grand opening, giving it its name. Since then, the walkway has fallen into some serious disrepair, but it is still used by climbers to access some of the climbing areas at El Chorro. It's protectable by via ferrata. By this point, Zeb and some of the Hampshire crew had already walked the Camino during one of their rest days, and more of the Hampshire crew had already done it earlier in this same afternoon. Nick and I figured that this was our once chance to walk it with Zebby as our "guide" (since today was a rest day for him), so we headed back to Almona to get our gear sorted out for that.
We are finally parked and walking in to the Camino by about 5:30 (with sunset at 6:30). We've packed our headlamps. Even the approach is a little tricky -- we have to walk up a hill to the railroad tracks, and then scramble down a slope with a little bit of scree before we can get onto the via ferrata.
We meet up with Earl and a Hampshire team on our approach (they're just coming off the Camino). Just getting onto the Camino is actually the crux of the whole thing. See, the section of the Camino that intersects with the railway tracks and was the originally-designed approach has been purposely destroyed to prevent people from accessing the Camino too easily. Instead, one must approach from below the Camino on a series of iron bars drilled into the side of the cliff and then ascend up third-class terrain to get to the Camino itself. Meanwhile, on the descent, one can either come back across the iron bars or can head straight to the modern end of the Camino (which traverses across the same section as the bars, just much higher up) and rappel back down to where you would start the bars. So Earl's team was rapping down when we came across them, and Zeb convinced Earl to leave the rope for us to use on our return so that we wouldn't have to come back across the bars at the end.
We also figured that, from that point, it would probably take at least an hour for us to travel the entire Camino, meaning that if we went the whole way we'd be returning in the dark, and no one was looking forward to trying to get me back in the dark. So we decided that we would just go to the bridge that was about a third of the way along the whole thing. Getting there contained the most "exciting" parts of the journey as well as the best views; the rest of the walkway was more mellow. That way, we wouldn't need to break out our headlamps for getting back.
So, Nick, Zeb, and I started off. We began with the hardest part -- crossing the iron rungs. Meanwhile, we clipped in to a variety of pieces of metal sticking out from the rock at waist-height, some of which looked sturdier than others. Zeb started out behind me, with Nick in front.
At this point, though, Zeb was already impatient and so switched to going in the front, while I had Nick behind me. At this point, we had to do the third-class scramble up to the Camino itself.
This scramble was a little challenging because it wasn't all protected, although a lot of it was. The rungs were far apart, meaning that even with our extra-long slings we could only barely be clipped into two at once, and had to shuffle back and forth a bit. There were some parts where our sling simply wouldn't reach the next rung, and we had to unclip entirely from one to get to the next one. But it wasn't too bad, and we eventually made it up onto the Camino itself.
Once on the Camino, it turned into a more standard via ferrata with wires on the side to clip into while we walked along.
Before long, though, we came to the first section (of two) where the cement had completely fallen away. Here, we had to walk along the outer iron rung of the Camino. There were a couple different techniques for doing this, but I chose to face into the cliff and shuffle my feet along sideways while leaning forward (across the gap where the cement should have been) onto the rock itself (and, when the rock was too far away to lean against, only onto the via ferrata wire).
From there, it wasn't long until we could see the "bridge," which was actually simply built over an existing pipe that connected the two sides of the gorge.
However, before we could get to it, there was another section we had to cross similar to the last, but longer. This time, the wall itself was too far forward to lean against, so I had to lean only on the wobbly wire, making it more challenging than the last crossing.
From there, we could see where we had come from, as well as where the path went.
Once we had gotten across, there was a wide, semi-natural platform where we unclipped and were able to take a few photos.
At that point, Zeb reported that the path got a lot less interesting, and that it was almost time to turn back. Before that, though, he showed us a tunnel into the rock off to the side that he said had once been used to pump water through. We got out our headlamps and headed through that to an opening in it. Then Zeb went back around to the outside so that we could get pictures of him on an exposed section of the Camino from the opening.
After that, Nick and I walk out through the tunnel to find Zeb. We don't see him immediately, so Nick heads along the section of the Camino where he was, while I head back towards the bridge in the other direction in case he got an early start back. Next thing I know, Zeb is behind me. Turns out that he had gotten behind me by returning into the tunnel directly from the exposed section of the Camino he had been posing on. You can walk directly from there into the tunnel on a walkway connecting the main Camino to the tunnel, but there is no via ferrata for this part. I'm glad I didn't see that.
We collect Nick (who seems a bit worried that he hasn't found Zebby yet) and start heading back along the way we came.
Across the bridge:
Along the second gap:
On an easy section of the Camino:
And along the first gap:
From there, though, we entered new territory. We had come up from the right here (coming up under the metal bar), but now, instead of going back that way, we continued on straight to the very end of the Camino:
As mentioned earlier, this path doesn't lead straight to the railroad bridge anymore, but instead comes to an abrupt end that you rap down from. Earl's rope was still there, so that's where we headed.
Our team had access to one GriGri and one tube-style device, so we figured the best plan was for Zeb to lower me with the GriGri, counterweight-rap off me, and then for Nick to rap himself down with his own tube-style device (in theory Zeb could have lowered Nick too, but Nick weighs, um, more than me, and it was a skinny rope).
So we made it! We still had to scramble up the hill to get back up to the main dirt road, but that was fine. We took a few scenery shots of the sunset and the gorge on our way out.
At that point, we headed back to Almona, picked up our food, and then back to Finca to cook our dinner (at Almona they were cooking something very onion-y -- which was true of all their meals). I discovered that the one picture decorating our room was actually of the bridge in the gorge (Nick was surprised I hadn't noticed that already).
Dinner was an omelet with 4 of our 8 eggs (plus bacon and cheese), except that two eggs sort of "escaped" in the process, meaning that after making four eggs into an omelet, we only had two left over for the following night. So after dinner we checked out the free box, which had some good pasta and pasta-with-sauce that we took for ourselves to use the following night. There was also beer in the free bin, but we didn't take that because we already had an abundance of wine and we couldn't donate anything to the Hampshire crew (no alcohol allowed).
After dinner, we headed back to Almona again to use their internet and watch the hearts game. Earl was quickly closing the gap between him and Zeb (Zeb was in the lead), but Zeb was still pretty confident. Then we headed back to Finca for the night. Good adventures for the day, but not quite enough climbing and a little too much time on the scary parts of the Camino!
2 comments:
You should have gone further - didn't even use your headlamps. If Zeb and Nick didn't have to haul Nika they probably could have done the whole thing.
Well we did use our headlamps in the tunnel. Zeb had already done it, but yes, Nick wanted to do more, but Zeb kept explaining that we had already done the "best" (scariest) part.
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