Peakbagger is such a phenomenal tool for planning, well, peak bagging.
The Gorafe desert is circled in red. No peaks over 800m. That’s bad. Sierra de Baza in orange. A peak over 1k prominence, Marta tells me that’s good. Sierra Nevada circled in green, with Mulhacen, Spain’s highest peak at 3478 meters. If you get bored or run out of piles of limestone to stand on top of, just drive for 30 minutes.
The biggest peaks in Spain are awesomely isolated, rising 3.5km out of the Mediterranean sea.Sierra de Baza has a nice gravel road right through it, tons of biking and hiking trails. The highest peak, Santa Barbara was only 250m vertical from the road. And it had Roman mines.Watch out for the 2000 year old mine shafts.
We didn’t see a single hiker/biker in Sierra de Baza. Just us and one motorcycle making the traverse. Where is everybody?
Spain has some nice basic mountain hutsClean. I would occasionally use these when hiking in the Pyrenees 25 years ago.This hut is a little more rustic.Brrr. Still, might save your life.On the drive across the valley to the Sierra Nevada, we come across this stylish castle, Calahorra.
This area was the last stronghold of the Moors – Muslims who took over Spain in the 8th century. After the Granada area was reconquered 700 years later, the locals were “converted” to Christianity. There were a couple big rebellions, and the area was depopulated – killed, or deported to North Africa.
North Africa became a base for the slave trade for the next 300 years. Except this was the trade in white Europeans, who were captured by pirates raiding as far away as Iceland! I’ve switched ChatGPT to sarcastic mode, and I can just imagine the AI eye roll – “Humans! – that’s just what you guys do.”
Spanish Ibex are impressive – and very common. These are likely a couple males who get along fine when women aren’t around.
The strength and size of wild goats and sheep remind me of a story. I grew up around ranchers and cowboys, some of whom were dumb enough to rodeo. One cowboy jumped out of a moving van on a wild baby mountain goat, imagining it would behave like a calf and cheerfully fall over. Instead his friends had to save his life.
We encounter herds of them on the mountain ridges.We have two days of hiking along the spine of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, including a 20km day with 1700m of elevation gain.
On this two minute time lapse, you can clearly see the cloud cap on the ridge descending and disappearing, and then bouncing back up a few kilometers downwind. This is wave, working with this phenomena is how I fly the longest glider flights in Canada. Spain has a lot of renewable projects. We’ve seen several concentrated solar projects – using the sun to make steam and electricity. Yet another technology that couldn’t compete against cheap solar panels from China.
I got some footage of random foxes, but this character was my favorite. Definitely didn’t feed him salami.Along the Costa del Sol, we find this lovely Karst hill, where microTigers have made their home in the numerous caves.
We were planning on flying back to Canada in mid April, but with the US/Israeli war ongoing and the possibility of fuel shortages and higher costs for air travel, we shortened our trip by two weeks.
Most likely this is an over reaction, but I was well served in business by reacting to possible risks immediately. Koliba will be waiting for us in Malaga when we come back in September. Pyrenees and Morocco, here we come!
On the way back home, we spend a night in Paris.
The Arc de Triomphe is surrounded by a giant traffic circle with 13 roads in/outThe Seine river in Paris is a working river, with big ships and this teeny tiny container terminal.I wonder how long the designer of the Eiffel tower thought it would last? It was built for an exhibition.Look at the latticework, all of which has to be cleaned and painted.
Marta and Chester's Maleficent Adventures 