Pyrenees – the famous mountain range in Europe

By Dan Rusu


de_rusu@yahoo.com


Three of the most famous mountain ranges in Europe: the Alps, the Carpathians and the Pyrenees – are extremely different from each other.


The longest range of them – the Carpathian Mountains – is low and almost everywhere up to the top was covered with forest. Its soft picturesque view does not change even in the gorges of the fast Carpathian rivers. Mountain streams can be called only conditionally: on them even fused timber rafts.

The highest mountain range – the Alps – in fact, not even the ridge, and the whole mountainous country of several parallel chains of mountain ranges, and worm-sawn numerous glaciers. The highest Alpine peaks rise above the surrounding mountains at 2,000 meters, but passes through the ridges, thanks to the tireless work of the glaciers, are low and easily accessible, with the possible exception that the area of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn.

Pyrenees cane, no doubt, be called the most inaccessible of all the mountain ranges of Europe. Although their highest point – the peak of Aneto – is almost half a kilometer below the Mont Blanc, the average height of the Pyrenees is more than the Alps. Lined up in an orderly line up, the snow-capped Pyrenean giants are mostly about the same height, and to find a gap in their ranks is not easy. Therefore passes through the Pyrenees are on average twice higher than the alpine passes.




Until recently, no railway crossed the Pyrenees, bypassing their Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. In the Central Pyrenees, there are places where for three hundred kilometers of the road no one passes through, lying at an altitude of about two and a half kilometers away, and to get from France to Spain, you can only follow shepherd trails.

Pyrenees represent an ideal mountain system: long straight chain mountains, from which, like the branches, extend side spines mostly directly opposite each other. Located between the transverse ridges of the valley deepened rabid mountain streams to such a degree that often resemble the American Grand Canyon. In the upper valleys are located glacial cirques - rocky amphitheater engaged once the glaciers. From the walls to the bottom of circuses thwarted waterfalls tape.

The biggest and most famous cirque is in the upper reaches of the river Gave de Pau in the north, in France, and is called Gavarni. It is much greater than the size of alpine cirques, but became famous in the first place, not for the size, but for its spectacular waterfalls.

Located at the foot of the circus Gavarnie, the second highest mountain in the Pyrenees - Monte Perdido, which reaches 3,356 meters and is only fifty meters inferior to the peak of Aneto. If the Matterhorn in the Alps is justly considered the most beautiful of granite peaks, the Monte Perdido can be called the most beautiful limestone top.

The limestone slopes of the southern slope of the Pyrenees, in recent years opened many karst caves, and it turned out that people lived in many of them are still in the Stone Age. Archaeologists have found here the rock carvings, clay figures and objects of everyday life of our ancestors.

In the Pyrenees is located, in particular, the second deepest cave of the world - a karst abyss Pierre-Saint-Martin, disappearing into the bowels of the mountains at 1,171 m, and the third largest cave system Trombe depth of 911 meters. (Deeper than them are only cave Rezo Jean-Bernard in Dolomites, reaching 1,602 meters.)

The Pierre Saint Martin is also the world's second biggest underground room: length 220, width 180 and a height of 150 meters! Large size underground cavities exists only in the Carlsbad Caverns in the USA.

As with other streams of karst areas, Pyrenean rivers often "disappear", diving in underground burrows, and then re-appear ten or twenty kilometers below. In the conditions of mountain terrain, this leads to the fact that in the interior there are sometimes fantastic complexity and picturesque karst masterpieces. For example, one of the rivers flowing through Sigaler cave, time to form a 52 underground waterfall to eighteen meters high!

It goes underground and the largest of the rivers beginning in the Pyrenees – the main river of southern France – Garonne. Its origins are in the south, the Spanish side of the ridge, near the peak of Aneto. It runs a few kilometers from its superior glacier, the river breaks waterfall off a cliff, and then dives into the karst abyss Trou de Tor. On the northern slope of the Pyrenees, Garonne is born again, appearing on the surface as a powerful source, named after the Eye of Jupiter. Collecting tons of water, the river is rapidly accumulating power high-water tributaries, and already from Toulouse it is a mighty waterway.

True lovers of the mountains, choosing to climb in the Western Europe, prefer to overcrowded Alpine slopes the hard way in the Central Pyrenees. And it's not seeking to have that travelers see sports climbing in these mountains. Deaf, devoid of roads and often trails, gorges, pristine nature, abundance of waterfalls, glacial cirques and caves provide the tourist a maximum of impressions.

The fauna of the Pyrenees is also better preserved than in the Alps. Here you can meet chamois and ibex, come across wild boars and bears, as well as very rare in European forests wolves.

THE “QUEBRANTAHUESOS” (The Beard Vultures)

By Pablo Goicolea Ruigomez

pablogoicolea@gmail.com

During my military service in Spain back in the 80’s, I was, so to say, “lucky” to be destined to the High Mountain Skiers corpse in Rioseta, near the Candanchú ski resort in the Pyrenees.

I remember clearly the moments when we were standing still in formation, with frostbite in our ears waiting for the morning review. No one dared to move, but I would somehow manage to glimpse to the sky to distract myself from the fact that it was freezing, always keeping my head looking front. Most of the times I looked, I would see a silhouette flying near el Pico Del Águila – a peak nearby, elegant as I had never seen before. Day after day, the same scene, it came out despite the snow, the stray wind currents, the storms, defying all the elements. It looked like an eagle but it flew like a vulture. I could not quite figure out what it was, so when I had the chance, I did a little research in a Bird’s book. This bird has an unmistakeable diamond-like tail with slim wings like a golden eagle.

It was the Quebrantahuesos, literally translated the “Bonebreaker”, technically the Gyapetus Barbatus, and the Beard Vulture in English. It was a rare species of Vulture that almost led to extinction in Europe, where there are only a few couples left, spread around the Pyrenees. Luckily, in the past years the population has been recovering, and some couples have been introduced in the Alps, in Picos de Europa and in Sierra Nevada, where they were already extinct.

Its name comes from its unusual diet. It feeds almost exclusively of bones from other dead animals. It is the only bird which does this, it occupies the last place in the food chain, and it only eats when all the other scavengers have finished. This is why, while most of the vultures have bold head and long necks, this one has feathered head, a short neck with a distinctive feather which looks like a beard and a mask over its eyes.

The Quebrantahuesos can swallow whole bones up to 20cm, but when bones are bigger, it uses a curious mechanism to break them in smaller pieces. It grabs the bones with its peak and starts flying high up in the sky, it looks for a big rock and, when it finds it, it lets the bones fall with the marksmanship of an archer and they break when they make contact with the rock.

I hope I have woke up your curiosity enough so that when we are in the Pyrenees, you can’t help but look up to the sky to see if you are the lucky one who find this amazing bird. If you do see it, please stop and contemplate its magnificence, it is worth the while.

A brief history of Time

By Jack Clarke

jack.james.clarke@gmail.com

Fellow Lions, I did not need to think hard about my topic. Marshalls, my employer, are a supplier of natural stone and hence I see rocks everywhere. I researched the history of the rocks we will walk on and hope you find the below of some interest.

The geology of the Iberian Peninsula consists of the rock formations on the Iberian Peninsula, which includes Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and Gibraltar. To the west, the peninsula is delimited by the continental boundary formed by the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. A collision of tectonic plates led to the formation of a new mantle. Iberia, which occupied the center of Pangea, the only terrestrial continent at the time, received a new suit made from 310 geologic and 290 million years due to the movement of tectonic plates. It modified the external and internal geology of the peninsula, when the movements gave rise to the destruction of the mantle that existed until that time, between 30 kilometers and 150 kilometers deep, and the formation of a new one today.

The Pyrenees form part of the huge alpine geological system. This 430 kilometre long, roughly east-west striking, intracontinental mountain chain divides France, Spain and Andorra. It has an extended, multi-cycle geological evolution dating back to the Pre Cambrian. The chain's present configuration is due to the collision between the microcontinent Iberia and the southwestern promontory of the European Plate (i.e. Southern France). The two continents were approaching each other since the onset of the Upper Cretaceous about 100 million years ago, and were consequently colliding 55 to 25 million years ago. After its uplift, the chain experienced intense erosion. A cross-section through the chain shows an asymmetric flower-like structure with steeper dips on the French side and more rolling formations on the Spanish side.

The Pyrenees stretch in a westnorthwest-eastsoutheast-direction over 430 km from the Bay of Biscay in the west to the Golf de Lyon and the Golf de Roses in the east, their width across strike varying between 65 and 150 km. They are bounded in the north by the North Pyrenees front, a major thrust fault along which units from the North Pyrenees have been transported over the southernmost part of the Aquitaine Basin their most northern reach. Their southern limit is the South Pyrenees fault. Here, thrust slices from the Sierras Marginales and their lateral equivalents are displaced southward. Yet in a larger, geologically more meaningful sense the Pyrenees continue farther west into the Basque and the Basque-Cantabrian chain. They finally disappear along the continental margin of Asturias. Likewise in the east, they do not just vanish in the Mediterranean, but rather pursue their course via the nappe units of the Corbières into low Languedoc and even into southern Provence. At their far eastern end in Provence, typical pyrenean fold trends are superimposed by alpine structures to be finally cut off by the arc of the western Alps.

The pyrenean chain in the larger sense is nearly a 1,000 km long.

The Death Zone

By Bernardo Felix

ber_enrique@hotmail.com

The ‘death zone’ is known in the mountaineering community as the altitude above sea level where the quantity of oxygen in the air we breathe is lower than the minimum that the human body cells require to live. Therefore, above that altitude the human body would start deteriorating and in some unfortunate cases this can lead to death.

This happens at altitudes above 8,000 meters and there are only 14 mountains above that level. There are two strategies to deal with the death zone, if you are trying to summit of these mountains. The first is to use artificial oxygen, it is simple, the lack of oxygen is replaced with bottled oxygen through your stay into the death zone. This strategy is widely used in the Himalayas and Karakorum, especially for the commercial expeditions. This method does not remove the technical difficulty of that particular mountain or the physical and mental endeavor that is required to get to the summit, but certainly makes it more easy, and some believe it to be a form of cheating.

For those who do not what to take with them bottled oxygen to the mountain, the strategy is to make their stay in the death zone as short as possible. For that a high altitude camp would be installed in the death zone threshold area. Physical and mental preparation are extremely important, as well as a very good acclimatization, as, without it, the stay in the death zone could last only minutes before developing high altitude sickness. Then you would wait for a window of good weather and try to assault the summit and get back to the high camp within 12 hours or less, if possible, sometimes it can take longer, but for sure you would avoid spending a night in the death zone.

The Pyrenees are not so high and dealing with lack of oxygen in the air will not be a problem. However, even at 3,400 meters people can develop altitude sickness, if the body does not acclimatize properly to sudden changes in altitude and pressure. For that reason, we will be progressively gaining altitude from our first day at Barcelona, and then moving to the base camp at El Poblado, etc. Keeping our bodies hydrated will always help and being fit for purpose, as well.

I am looking forward to my first trip to the Pyrenees and hope to meet the Lions team very soon.

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