Awesome Weekends (Picos de Europa)

This is kind-of a continuation of my last post, but I decided that the weekend really needed to be broken up into smaller pieces.
So, Picos de Europa is a national park in Spain on the boarder between Asturias and Cantabria in the Cantabrian Mountains. It is the oldest and largest national park in Spain and one of the oldest and largest "wild places" in Europa (according to the Picos website).
It was amazing.
We basically took a 1-day backpacking trip. We left from Covadonga by bus to the Lagos of Covadonga.
It's 20 km from Covadonga to the Lagos, so here we are securing a ride back on Sunday morning.
There were a lot of these taxis, and we had to bargain a bit to not pay ridiculous prices.

The Lagos were amazingly beautiful.

When we got up to the Lagos, we discovered that it had snowed in the mountains that night, and it was pretty chilly.

We left the Lagos and headed up into the mountains.
All of the yellow-green bushes are very prickly, and we broke the law by taking plant matter out of the park with us, although it was in the form of thorns in our hands! For the first part of the path, we followed a stream up into the mountains and it was very muddy and a little treacherous, but very pretty.

After we got out of the mud, the path mostly went through pasture land.

Some of these pictures are from the way back, which is why the lighting is so different, but we did literally walk through herds of goats and cows. It felt like we were in the "Sound of Music".

We ate lunch at a cirque.

Peanut butter and cheese sandwich with a carrot knife.

After the cirque, the trail rose very steeply and got rockier.
And we ran into this horse that we couldn't really walk around, so we followed it until we could pass it.
Right after we met this horse, we found...


Snow! It was actually really snowy for a while on the trail, but it was still really warm, because we were walking at a fairly brisk pace.
We spent the night in a refuge in the mountains with a whole bunch of really friendly Spanish people. It was a great experience because we got to both be in these beautiful mountains and practice our Spanish. It was 7.6km from the lakes and 600m higher than the lakes. There's more information (in Spanish) at: http://reddeparquesnacionales.mma.es/parques/picos/recomen/recomendaciones128.htm

Here's the refuge.

And we had a really excellent dinner, and since we were in Spain, there was wine, although it was served in paper cups.


The fire was the only heat source, and the only place to dry our damp shoes, but it was a bit smokey.

Our refuge was near a very famous gorge in the Picos, so we took a short trip to go check it out.
We found this scary cave, as well as a lovely hanging valley, accompanied by a mysterious cave in addition to the gorge.

There was a really prominent snow-line on the mountains on the other side of the gorge.
We also found coral in the limestone that we were sitting on when we went to visit the gorge. I love the juxtaposition of the coral and the snow.

We had to leave the refuge really early in the morning so we could make it back to Covadonga to catch our bus. Notice that it's still dark outside while we're preparing to leave.

It actually turned out to be really good that we left early because the sunrise in the mountains was beautiful.

The mountains were really incredible, and Picos is definitely one of the most amazing beautiful places I've ever been. Climbing through the mountains made me want to be a structural geologist when I grow up.

This video is of the wonderful music of the animals in Picos (I didn't take this video, so the credit should go to my travelling companion.