so in this video i thought i'd answer some of your questions that you have
about hiking in the pyrenees whether you've thought about doing something like the gr11
or the hrp before or you're just interested to see how through hiking here compares to
wherever you're from i think you'll get a lot of that for this video especially if you're into
long distance hiking all right let's get into it
first question is about wild camping from michael mountain runner who says do you know
if wild camping is permitted in spain france in the pyrenees yes it absolutely is sometimes
you'll find other conflicting information and i think that's because each park has their different
rules certainly down in the south of spain the sierra nevada i know the rules are a lot stricter
but generally in the pyrenees if you're above say eighteen hundred or i think two thousand meters
in some parks you're able to completely wild camp on your own but it's really common on the pyrinian
fruit hikes to utilize the manned huts so there is refuges throughout the entire mountain range
and they will be supplying your bed your dinner and your breakfast in the morning sometimes they
even provide a packed lunch for you but generally if you're around those huts you can't wild camp
near them sometimes they'll have little areas set apart where you can pay a nominal amount and just
camp and eat your own food most of the time if you're camping you'll have to be spending some
money like eating dinner and breakfast within the hut but just check with each hut as you go
but if you're not planning on utilizing the huts there's a whole bunch of other options there's
little cabanas like unmanned huts uh in scotland they call them bothers
a lot of the time they're just little tin sheds with a concrete floor you put your mat down and
it's a great way to save time putting up your tent a lot of them are pretty clean and very usable
and so in a pinch they're great to use as well but for the most part while camping is totally
fine in the pyrenees just stay away from arable land farmed areas don't go into private property
and obviously don't do it anywhere towns and populated areas you want to keep your wild camping
wild that means nowhere near roads so generally up high above 2000 meters is fine i'm going to
get to the next question in a minute but first i want to thank skillshare for sponsoring this video
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gas did you use could you get gas cartridges in the villages you passed through did you ever cook
on the campfire is it allowed to answer the last question no it's not allowed to have fires in the
pyrenees so i didn't cook on a campfire but in terms of gas for my whole trip that was like a
month long i think i used about three of those 250 ml cans i picked up my first bottle in elizondo
that's one of the first towns when you're walking from the basque countryside heading east i think i
picked up another one in parzan and then another one in la jonqueria so pretty much every major
town you walk through and there's a lot of them in the pyrenees a lot of those major towns will have
a feratheria or like a hardware store and that's generally where i would find the gas occasionally
there are at supermarkets if you're flying in you won't be able to bring your gas canister from home
obviously so you have to buy one there but if you want to know exactly which towns and which stores
have gas bottles then you can pick up either one of these cicerone guides there's one for the
gr10 as well and that'll tell you exactly where you'll be able to find your type of gas canister
there's three different types of gas canisters that are sold in the pyrenees there's the original
the easy click and then the typical msr coleman style gas bottles as well the other thing about
food and gas re-supplying that i think you should be aware of especially in spain is that we have a
siesta here it starts at about two o'clock in the afternoon and goes until five meaning that all
the stores will be closed they'll also probably be closed all sunday maybe only open half of saturday
so it's really useful to keep that in mind when you are planning to come into town or passing
through towns in order to resupply you'll have to get there as early as possible to make sure
you get there before the shop shut it two or come later in the afternoon when they reopen at five
worst case scenario you get there at two it's closed you have a couple of beers and wait for
it to reopen morgs says if you're on the hrp in august i hope i bump into you yes i will be
on the hmp in august i would love to see you morgs has also had a little bit of knee pain
ironically i've been enjoying your videos to fix the knee so thank you for the information
i'm glad you're making some progress with that man good for you get in there and do the work and for
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for mountain proof news rob j bell asks what month is best for this trek for weather conditions
good question as a lot of these mountains have high passes it's not really possible
to do before june i'm sure you could make this a mountaineering trip and start earlier bringing
ice axes and crampons but that's really going to slow you down most people don't start until the
last week of june and from then onwards it gets a lot warmer the snow banks start to melt and those
passes become a lot easier to get through for me i prefer to start in august that just means that
i don't have to carry any of that heavy equipment i know that by august most of those snow banks are
going to be gone and then it's just something that i don't have to think about i personally wouldn't
start any later than say the last day of august i think once you get into september the weather can
be particularly bad in the catlin pyrenees we get some storms and some rain and some wind and then
once you get closer to october that really starts pushing into the time where you could potentially
have snowfall so you definitely want to get out of there by end of september patrick carmel says
that h in ought is silence yes i'm probably going to forget that and keep saying horde but
just so you know i'm trying farmer spud uh say chase i know there's a small number of black
bears in the pyrenees any worries just puts me off hiking in europe sometimes i wouldn't be
put off with it i think there's probably only about eight black bears in the pyrenees they've
only just been reintroduced along with wolves and some other species that became extinct
a long time ago the pyrenees is a huge area this is only a really small amount of animals and there
is so many marmots for these bears to eat i don't think they're going to be bothered hunting down
people i personally wouldn't worry about it but if you really want to you can bring some bear spray
and then do all the normal precautionary things like looking after your food maybe throwing in
a tree but i have certainly never seen anyone do that in the pyrenees and i think it'll be a
long time before the beer population gets that higher then we have to worry about it scl asks
do you have any experience with ticks by far the most dangerous animal i think in the pyrenees i
really suggest bringing a tick remover or tweezers and learning how to take them out properly being
australian i've got a lot of experience in this and my recommendation is to get in as close as you
possibly can try and get their head with the very end of the tweezers if you're using them and try
and pull them out from the head because you don't want to have the head left in there that's going
to be bad news getting lyme disease is not going to be cool having said all that i've never had a
tick in the pyrenees hopefully i never will have one so they're not rampant at least at the times
that i've been going there seo also asked do you have any experience with sleeping in a hammock on
a long distance hike do you think this would be an option for the gr11 i am not a hammock guy i
had a really bad night's sleep in a hammock in a jungle in cambodia one time and from then on that
was it for me i generally sleep on my side or on my stomach so i'm not a hammock guy to the second
part of your question though would it be possible yes but it's probably not ideal there's not always
forested areas on the gr11 i would generally camp in a forested area just for the protection
and the warmth underfoot but a lot of the time we're out in fairly exposed alpine meadows
and occasionally on a ridge and there's no trees there so yes you can but you're probably gonna
have to be really selective and you have to sleep down a lot lower for the hrp that situation is
going to be even worse there's going to be less trees because you'd be staying up higher more
often mark asks how many navigation tools will you be using app or a guidebook so i definitely
utilize the sister only guy books i highly recommend getting them i bought them in the paper
version so i can chill at home and flick through them and read them and then i'd buy the digital
version on my phone so i can have those notes without taking the weight of the book last year
for an app i use locus maps this year i'm going to be using outdoor active the maps are much better
it's easier to use you can plot far easier you can plot on your phone i'm going to do a whole video
about how i'm planning my route and software i'm using so hang out for that i'll link it up here
when it's done so if you're doing any of the gr roots like the 10 the 11 the seven these are
probably going to be pretty well marked and you'll see that there's mainly three types of markings
that you'll see there's the two lines which means you're on the trail everything's going good
there is the corner sign which means obviously you're going to turn left or right depending on
which way it's pointing and then there's the cross which means hey you've just recently started going
in the wrong direction you're heading off trail spin around and find the two lines and this makes
it really easy to navigate i mean certainly you should have a guidebook and it's a great
idea to get that mapping software from outdoor active or all trails or whatever you want to use
but the fact is that these are all marked trials and it's actually pretty hard to get lost but
having that apping software as a backup plan and perhaps even a map and a compass if you're
old school is a really good idea when it comes to the hrp things are a little bit different this
isn't a map to root and it's quite ambiguous the way you choose hrp is really kind of a philosophy
you can select a lot of different variants and kind of choose your own adventure along the way
so it's not really marked and for that reason my navigation and my planning is going to be a lot
more significant this year i'm going to have to put a little bit more effort into that and that's
part of why i chose this this is a little bit of a challenge he also asked how many town resupply
points are there depends on which route you're doing but in general you'll pass through a town
about every three or four days sometimes every day but obviously not all towns have the same
facilities gonna be different in every town that's why getting the guidebook is basically essential
to find out which towns have got what this will allow you to plan your food and gas usage
around every three or four days meaning that you don't have to do all of this planning beforehand
you can kind of wing it which is one of the great things about hiking the pyramids it's quite easy
rodnemy asked do you need a lot of mountaineering experience to hike that hrp i would say no but
it's definitely going to help i mean there is no point on the hrp where you have to tie into a rope
there may be some handrails every now and then that you'll have to grab onto but i wouldn't say
that mountaineering experience like on snow and ice and glaciers is essential no what is probably
essential is that you have a good understanding of how your body works especially in high
places you probably wouldn't want to go into this with an incredibly bad fear of heights and if you
suffer from vertigo so just being more comfortable on that kind of terrain will help so that kind
of high mountain hiking experience is definitely essential but not so much mountaineering although
they do classify the hrp as a mountaineering route plant powered tea i think that's thomas hey mate
asks what's your estimated cost budget for the hrp through hike and did you do any calculation or
financial summary of the gr11 i had a quick look at my bank statement and i remembered the amount
of cash that i had when i started and i put that together and figured that it was around a thousand
euros and this is a really good general rule that you can stick to especially from the u.s i noticed
that a lot of other content creators have saying that you spend around about a thousand us dollars
in a month and i think that rings true to the pyrenees as well but rather than us dollars it'll
be a thousand euros having said that you can make this a lot cheaper if you don't stay in refuges
at all if you are conservative with the kind of food you buy if you don't drink too many beers
it would be nice if you could through hike and save money but it doesn't really work like that
it's still a pretty expensive thing to do and certainly most of your expenses will come in
preparing the gear and getting the flights and probably taking
the time off work as well i've had a lot of questions about water in the pyrenees
water in the pyrenees is great you absolutely have to filter it though there is a high concentration
of farmed animals in these areas so you definitely need to have a filter or a treatment source of
some way i like to use a category b3 super easy to use there are many situations in the pyrenees
where you're going to be drinking water from the same place that animals drink from whether
it's a trough or a stream so it's very very important that you treat the water grab one of
these b3 filters they are great makes everything super easy and you can basically forget about it
where possible i like to drink from streams that are up high that are basically trickling through
rock so it naturally kind of gets filtered but in any case you want to stay well away from animals
and you always want to filter it in terms of volume on the gr11 i only had
a capacity of about three liters this year on the hrp i'm going to take four liters at least i think
and then keep in mind that if you're going to be camping away from water sources that you'll need
at least two liters for a dry camp by the time you cook wash up drink some water in the evening in
the morning you want to have two liters i try and have at least that maybe two and a half three for
a dry camp so the next couple of videos i've got coming up are really about sharing this journey
that i'm going on with you guys i want to show you what i'm doing with my training how i'm planning
it my route how i'm going to navigate the trip and of course what i'm taking for gear along the way
if i didn't answer your question in this video then more than likely i answered it in my other
older q a video about the pyrenees i'll link it up here so you can check it out but otherwise thank
you for watching thank you for interacting with me commenting and being part of this community
i've actually learned so much from you guys i'm really enjoying making these videos and taking
you along the way thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this video and keeping the lights on
and helping me up the production quality of these videos i'll see you on the summit