Beautiful peak and lake in the Pyrenees

in #travel8 years ago

pyr_n_es

Hi Steemians !
Today I will show you a pristine hike in my homeland: the Pyrenees, French side.

It's been a week with no news here, and it is actually because I left South Africa to visit my country: France. And I have been (too) busy!

A few days ago I decided to go for a hike as I used to do when I was living there. Oh....maybe you don't locate Pyrenees very well?
It is just there:

Me and my partner went to the lake of Appy, a 3 hour hike. We stayed the night in a rustic hut, usually used by shepherds but nicely open to visitors for free. The next day we climbed a peak, quite famous in the area, the St Barthelemy Peak, 2400m high, and went back to the valley.

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Lake of Appy

I have been to the lake couple of time, it is amazingly beautiful. We just suffered from the heat as we have very high temperatures at this time (over 30°C !). And no shade! But we swum in the lake and that was very nice.

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Me before a bath

The hut is small,we had a bed that can sleep two and a fire place. Rustic, simple, but very authentic.

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Our accommodation for a night

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Simple but quite cute

In the late afternoon we saw a couple of mouflons. I don't find a translation for this "wild sheep". They live in mountains and are very agile on rocks. That was a great moment. We just saw females with babies, the male always have a very impressive pair of horns.

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A female with the baby of the previous year

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It's easy on the rocks!

The next days we had a long climb. We ascended about 800 m .We were going up to a neck, then up to a peak, down to an other neck, and the up to the proper peak, the St Barthelemy Peak. The hard time was to go back after this effort and have an other steep up hill to climb! But we did it, and the view up there was magnificent. It took us 3 hours to climb and 3 hours 30 to go back where we left our car in the valley.

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View from the St Barthelemy Peak, 2400m high

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On the top!

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The exhausting last up hill

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An other view of the lake with the Pyrenees in front. We can see some Spanish peaks.

Hope you liked this article, tell me what you think! Please give me ideas of other hikes around the world!

Copyright: All pictures by Isabelle Sanfilippo

Cheers, @isa-za ;)