Gardena Pass, Rifugio Puez and Vallunga

Down for breakfast and I made sure I had extra this morning, seeing as it’s a big walk. Because I was till aching, I also popped some Ibuprofen - Boyd swears by them!! Paul realised that we’d forgotten to order rolls last night and I mentioned it to Ruth, who very kindly went and made us some. We got our stuff together and drove out through La Villa, stopping off at a place on the way to finally post the postcards. Drove up the Gardena Pass, which seemed fairly familiar and then on down in Selva, which definitely wasn’t.

We found the road easily enough and somewhere to park, just down the road from the cable car station. The fact that this wasn’t the P on the map completely escaped me until later, but actually it didn’t matter. We needed to pay E4, but neither of us had any change at all, so we drove up to the cable car station, paid for our tickets separately, and used the change to pay for the parking. Then we walked back up the road and caught the cable car up to the top + a bit of the Gardena Pass. We saw a couple of marmots on the way, which was a treat.

The view back down the Gardena Pass

Headed off along the path that runs below the VFs and then took path 2, up and through a rocky valley, up and down a bit and then up again to a fence line.

Looking back through the rocky valley

It was a very cold wind at this point, so I put my waterproof on and rolled up the sleeves. Through the fence line was the ‘escape’ valley, but I felt absolutely fine and still strong, so I said I’d like to push on to the Rifugio and the main Vallunga valley.

The view down the 'escape' valley

Looking across the head of the 'escape' valley to the highest point of the walk

We headed off around the head of the ‘escape’ valley and then up again to a cross, the highest point on our walk at over 2,500m.  From there the terrain was positively lunar, with so much rock exposed that it almost looked like snow.  Part way across this area, which was fairly gently undulating, we stopped for a bite to eat and ate our rolls, which were a bit messy (tomato everywhere!), but lovely.

From there we continued on and initially I thought we were going to have a very steep drop and rise into a valley that appeared on our right (kind of south east),

The valley to our right

but then I realised we were going to follow the ridge in between this valley and Vallunga.

A preview of Vallunga - they don't call it the long valley for nothing!!

From there it was a fairly steady rise to Rifugio Puez – saw another marmot, whistling as it ran down the edge of a cliff - and although it was by now quite cloudy, it was still sunny, although still a cold wind, so we sat inside.

I discovered that I’d caught the sun again because I hadn’t been wearing my hat. The Factor 30 is fine as long as I keep my horrid hat on. We discovered afterwards that we’d only missed the others by about 15-20 minutes, as they left about 1:45pm and we arrived about 2pm.

I was still feeling pretty good at that point, but now the bit I’d been vaguely worrying about as I really wasn’t sure how my knees would hold up.

Down and down and down, right across the head of the valley to

join the path that comes down in the far corner.

In fact the path was quite long, but because of that it was also a bearable steepness, so we contoured around

the head of the valley, over a big lump and met with the path that went straight from the col we’d crossed earlier. Wouldn’t have fancied coming down that way, it was all scree and looked horribly loose.

From there we followed a lot of scree alongside water worn gullies and kept dropping steeply until we got into the trees. From there it started to level out a bit and I suggested a second stop to give my knees a rest. Paul pointed out that it was 3:40pm and we had about three miles to go, so we continued... we didn’t really have much choice.

Once we got onto flatter ground in the grassy sections, Paul set a furious pace, which I managed to keep up for a while – we still had more than two miles to go – but eventually we had to slow a bit. After another brief stop we just kept going, meeting more and more people who were walking up from the car park that we meant to park in. Actually I’m glad we didn’t because we’d probably have walked back along the road to get the cable car and the way we ended up doing it was much more pleasant and took us straight back to Biscuit Tin at 5:15pm, a total time of 6½ hours, with a total stoppage time of probably nearly an hour. Not bad considering the book suggested a time of 6 hours, particularly after the fiasco yesterday. Weird how completely different two days can be.

We got back to Pedraces in about three quarters of an hour and had time for a shower and a start on the packing before going down for dinner, which was fish and chips. Waggy had seconds of nearly everything, it’s a wonder he doesn’t explode. Sat with them for a while after dinner while they worked out what they’re doing tomorrow and then headed upstairs to read.