MICROTRIP #12 PQ

This microtrip was not like the others: no summit, no peak to stand on, but the landscape carried something of an old fairy tale, and by the end it had almost the feel of a pilgrimage. Everything sat where it should have, as though someone had set the vegetation, the goats, and the stones in place before we got there.

It began cold. The thermometer at the bar in Gósol read eight degrees while we drank our coffee, Artur our guide, Clemente, Maddie, Juan, Martí, and me. In the bar’s courtyard a small waterfall was already running, a foretaste of what the Aigua de Valls river held for us later. We climbed back into the car and drove to the trailhead, still half urban with sewers and sidewalks, though bit by bit the asphalt dropped away and we entered the forest. The area had changed so much since we last saw it under snow that we hardly knew it: now boxwood scrub and red pine forests let through a filtered golden light. From a distance we watched goats cross the very path we would later walk high on the mountain.

In the forest we met a hunter who gave us little more than a nod, three dogs at his heels who gave us even less. We kept on, talking among ourselves and listening to Artur explain the terrain, polymictic conglomerates from the Eocene, according to the guidebook, threading through the river’s narrow gorge until we reached where the loop began. Artur told us we would do it backward so that we finished at the water, something we would be grateful for later.

We climbed to the height needed to skirt around the mountains. An abandoned farmhouse stood there, one of those that time has returned to stone, and from it we heard again the hunters’ dogs, farther off this time. That was where things took on a different character: after several climbs and drops the rocks began closing in around us, showing their age. They were vertical conglomerate walls rising dozens of meters, witnesses to millions of years of erosion. From there we looked down into the valley full of pines, holm oaks, and Mediterranean shrubs all sharing that particular altitudinal band of the Pre-Pyrenees (between 900 and 1600 meters, where montane forest yields to subalpine). The path was green and rocky, always marked by footprints from those who had gone before; it narrowed and grew more wooded as we came down off the stone, and already we could hear the river drawing nearer, steady as a pulse.

At last we reached the water and pulled off our boots to cross the Aigua de Valls river, cold as mountain rivers are. The Pont Quebradís rose ahead of us: a natural bridge of rough stone some 30 meters high and 50 long according to our guide, made by fallen blocks piling up while the river carved out an underground gallery about 60 meters long beneath them. We saw limestone caverns forming a kind of bridge or tunnel with speleothems (those stalactite-like formations that “hang” and coat where water runs from inside the mountain down to the river) gleaming in low light. 

We stepped into icy water, Aigua de Valls rises at 1,328 meters just south of Gósol, and spent some time with it sometimes spilling over us as we walked along its rocky bed. The cold sharpened everything: wet stone smell, moss smell; only then did we truly value sun on our skin after all that water. On our return we entered forest once more and finished walking among branches and fallen trunks with river sound now distant but still there. An echo that kept us company all the way back to our car.