Abri Baecherkopf - Col des Perches
Effective km: 28.5, total km: 29.5
Elevation: up 1110m, down 780m
Min altitude 343m, max altitude 1195m

I did not sleep well, I felt more scared than I do camping in the forest. I woke up a lot and heard noises that it was hard to decide if they were animal or human. Many people, me among them, have been conditioned by Hollywood that cabins in the woods are scary, while in reality, there is next to no chance some bad person will come by. I think most people can be put into one of two groups: those who feel safer with people around them and those who feel safer with no-one around. It seems to have something to with growing up in or outside the city. I've grown up in the city and I fall firmly into the first category. But at least I did sleep, and at 7.15 came by to check that everything was okay with the cabin. Good thing they did that in daylight, if it had still been dark it'd have scared the hell out of me.
It took me some time to get started and I left at 9.00. All down, and it was getting warm already. I saw a few small lizards.
It took an hour and a half to finally reach Thann, where I went shopping for the next two days. With all the repacking and calculating (I now walk trhough the supermarket adding up the calories of things I pick, to make sure I have enough and don't bring too much food), it takes an hour. That includes the 'whoo I can eat yoghurt and fresh fruit!' break.
After Thann, it was up. Narrow forest paths mostly, some wider ones. Most of the time sloping upwards but not too steeply. For a while I was driven crazy by flies which weren't paying much heed to my fly-repellant spray.
I passed a clearing and parking lot, where I took a short break, not because it was such a nice spot but because the path was going to climb again and I needed a break before that, and I also had to eat the two tomatoes that were too heavy (but really, sometimes I just need vegetables). Then the climbing started. As I'm not good at pacing myself, I always go either too fast or too slow, I started counting my steps and only pausing every 100 paces if necessary. This worked really well, as I can just do what I always do: go fast for a while, then full stop. It always works better for me than trying to pace myself. When I'm at a festival, or dancing, or in love, I just go in for 100% as long as I can, then crash for a while, then repeat. I hate having to limit myself to a 50, 60 or 70% that I can keep up for longer, so this way works better.
Up the slopes it also worked. When I go too slow it's just exhausting, too fast tires me out. But this way I could stop every 100 paces to catch my breath, take a drink, wipe my face. It also gave me allocated moments to do those things instead of sometimes stopping again 15 seconds after I started walking again; that's tiring too. So I kept doing this wherever the slopes were steep enough. I passed a rocky outcropping by rocky paths that I like, and apparently people felt it necessary to add a fence. I seem to have a fear of heights, when standing on human-made things and especially if there's nothing but air below the thing I'm standing on; but it's really a fear of falling, and in the mountains, I don't have it at all. There's probably a limit height at which I start disliking standing near edges or looking down steep slopes, but I haven't encountered it yet.

You know this thing about sudden weather changes in the mountains? It's real. All morning it was sunny, bright, and pretty hot, some 30°C. The views were a bit hazy, like yesterday, but otherwise it was mostly cloudless. Then suddenly between 15.00 and 15.30, the haze thickened into overcast, there was wind and a hint of distant thunder. Ahead I saw both rain clouds and white, fluffy clouds with sunshine on them. I passed other hikers, all going in the direction I was coming from, so they apparently didn't mind, but I didn't trust it. So when I passed a ski club refuge (after passing through two fences with rather adorable notes on them saying "The cows are back, please close the fence") I stopped for a drink and to see if it would rain and if the thunder would come closer or go away. Different kinds of weather in different layers of sky just looks off to me, and I'd rather be very overcautious then caught in a lightning storm.

After an hour and a pleasant conversation with someone who asked (jokingly) if I couldn't give a mental health course there, the threatening weather had all moved to the valley in the northeast and beyond, and I was going west and northwest, so I felt it was safe to leave again. Upwards over fields, then I met some rocks just at the top, and I like standing on rocks so of course I wanted to climb them.
I passed a ferme-auberge with a blue macaw in a cage, which felt wrong, and they responded somewhat grumpily to my asking to refill my water bottle (there was a source earlier which apparently I missed).
I walked on to another hut where I thought I could sleep, but it turned out to be way too small. And as it was only 18.30 and I still had energy left, I decided to walk on. That included another 250m upwards, but I didn't mind. I used the counting system again, it also helps to keep a rhythm in the steps, which makes it a lot less tiring. In the end, I climbed 1110m today without feeling exhausted.
The narrow forest path became rockier, included some balancing over rocks (yay!) and they even installed a ladder to bridge a height difference. I really liked it all, I had totally not expected to have this kind of energy today.
After the top at 1195m, this one full of trees (most summits here are empty due to wind) I went down again to 1070, where I turned off the route to find a gîte closeby, hoping I'd be able to camp and shower there. That turned out to be the case, so after a much-needed shower (I've been drenched in sweat several times over the last two days), I am now enjoying an actual porcelain cup of tea. And this time I got further than I expected, I thought I wouldn't make so many kilometers because of the 11 km of almost constant climbing and sleeping badly. Maybe I got lucky, maybe this system of counting steps works.

Geschreven door Jewaontheroad