The Practice d’Artouste: Europe’s highest narrow-gauge prepare

My warm-up hike was the 20-minute trek to the dam, a monumental 27m-high concrete wall holding again an historic, crystalline lake from the dry, fertile valley on the opposite aspect. A thick and fast-moving fog turned fellow hikers into ghostly silhouettes and obscured entire mountains, reminding us that up right here, nature is a capricious shapeshifter. 

After dismissing the final crumbs of my tuna sandwich lunch alongside different picnickers, I tightened my mountaineering bootlaces and adopted indicators for the Lacs d’Arrémoulit path. The two.5-hour climb ends on the Arrémoulit mountain refuge (2,305m altitude) within the Pyrenees Nationwide Park, which straddles the French and Spanish border and options glacial lakes, floral meadows, caves, ravines and historic peaks and valleys throughout. The world across the park’s Mount Perdu contains two of Europe’s largest and deepest canyons and is a Unesco World Heritage Web site.  

The hike began gradual and simple, with views of the turquoise Lac d’Artouste in my peripheral imaginative and prescient, and the grass-carpeted mountain peaks looming up forward. The Pyrenees are older, and a few say much less dramatic, than the Alps, the upper, snow-capped mountain vary to the east. However the mountain panorama right here is arguably extra rugged and unspoiled and boasts one in all France’s most biodiverse ecosystems: 3,000 plant species, and greater than 4,000 animal species – together with goat-antelopes, brown bears and Egyptian vultures. 

With the lake behind me, the climb started to get tougher and my footing much less certain as the paths appeared to develop narrower and rockier with the ascent. However every new step rewarded me with views of pink flowering mosses, pops of purple irises and butter-yellow Adonis flowers, and I adopted them like breadcrumbs on a path.