HexaTrek Tales Part 9: The Western Pyrenees, Stage Six, and Saying Wow

At the summit of Le Petit Vignemale, 3032 meters high, I looked around. The sky shone a brilliant blue. The mountains were sprinkled with snow. Clouds floated through the air like fairy floss. A friend, who was a stranger not too long ago, sat on a rock nearby. The wind, our soundtrack, eased for just a moment. It left silence and disbelief and the undeniable sensation that these were, and would always be, some of the most beautiful days of my life.

Le Petit Vignemale.

You’d think that by the final stage of the HexaTrek, those last 412 kilometers, the magnificence of the trail would no longer be a surprise. You’d think it would no longer prompt an intake of breath, the question of, “How is this real and how did I get so lucky?”. You’d be wrong. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that for days on end during Stage Six, especially when walking through Le Parc National de Pyrenees, it was non-stop beauty. 

Le Cirque de Gavarnie surrounded us with walls of waterfalls. 

Le Petit Vignemale reintroduced us to the beautiful world of snow, while its bigger sibling beckoned the gaze like a magnet. 

Lac Gaube was so idyllic it seemed like a dream. 

Lac Gaube, a dream.

Le Pic du Midi, bathing in the light of a full moon, begged us to stay awake just a little longer.

La Vallée d’Aguas Tuertas, with its curving streams and mauve-coloured mountains, seemed more like a painting than reality. 

La Vallée d’Aguas Tuertas.

Horses roamed in the Basque countryside, and the villages greeted us with their cream houses and red shutters. 

And then, the ocean. It appeared on the horizon. A big thing symbolizing the end of a big adventure and the start of a big unknown. 

Stage Six was beautiful, but not without its challenges. 

Walking further into autumn, and closer toward winter, brought more temperamental weather. 

There were spontaneous days off brought on by the threat of torrential downpours. There were warnings from locals of extreme winds on particular passes. There were days when it rained almost constantly and even my endless waterproofing layers could not protect me or my gear. And, of course, there was that thunderstorm we underestimated. Lightning, thunder, rain, scrambling to get to lower elevation, and then sitting in a bar, two hours later, wondering how the hell we’d been so stupid.

The land spoke loud and clear; it was time to finish this little walk.

The body spoke too (or, more accurately, it shouted). 

In Stage Five, I felt great. I felt like I could walk and walk and the previous couple thousand kilometers was just something that lived in my memory. That changed at the start of Stage Six, when I started coughing and didn’t stop. 

An excerpt from my journal summarizes the situation, and my mindset, fairly well:

“I’m starting to dig into the reserves. I’ve been sick for over a week. I’ve been coughing day and night. I think I have a chest infection. I feel myself growing weaker, emptier, more fatigued. My reserves are a deep well, and there are false bottoms along the way. Let’s see how many of them I discover in the 264.7 kilometres remaining until the Atlantic Ocean.”

The cough that made everything significantly harder — walking, laughing, sleeping, breathing. Of course, a reasonable person could argue (and many did) that I should have stopped walking and rested. I’d recommend the same to a friend in a similar position. Instead, I chose to remain stubborn, enter mission mode, and explore that well of reserves. I accepted that sickness would accompany me until the end of my hike. Indeed, it did. 

An idea I didn’t stop thinking about.  

Sickness didn’t stop my legs from wandering — or my mind. In Stage Six, I had one of the most significant realizations of my hike. 

We were taking shelter from the rain when my friend Julien brought up the idea of ‘Wow people’. Quite simply, Wow people are people who say “Wow” often. 

Stay with me. 

Wow people say “Wow” when they reach the top of a pass and see the mountains on the other side. They say “Wow” at a sunrise or a sunset, at a tall tree or a soaring bird or the mist that settles over a lake. 

What’s important though, is that they also say “Wow” at the seemingly mundane. They say “Wow” to the same breakfast they‘ve eaten 500 times before. They say “Wow” to a crumpling of a dried leaf on the sidewalk. They say “Wow” at the duck who has a nice feather, “Wow” to the pleasing texture of a rock.

Wow to chickpeas and hummus.

I thought, almost non-stop, about the idea. There’s something about saying “Wow”, especially to things that don’t usually prompt that response, which I love. It’s wonderfully childish. It’s free and unrestrained. It shows a willingness to overlook the unwritten rules about what you should and shouldn’t be impressed by. The rules that say you should be impressed by an expensive work of art, but not impressed by the way that bird shit is actually quite beautiful. 

That simple concept captures something I adore — in others, in life, in myself.  

I felt that there was some fundamental, significant lesson buried in the idea of Wow people. Some words to tattoo within myself as a reminder. After several hours of searching, they found me…

Let yourself be impressed by life. 

The magnificent, the everyday, the novel, the routine. Anything and everything can impress you, if you let it.

That idea is one of the most important things I’ve realized and been able to articulate. Not just in Stage Six and not just on the HexaTrek; in life. Wow to that. 

But what about the end?

Stage Six is the final stage of the HexaTrek, so what happened? Well, I did indeed finish the hike. But, here I just wanted to write about Stage Six. I wanted to respect that those 412 kilometers contained more than just the end. As with this whole journey, I wanted to untangle the completion of the hike from the hike itself. 

Plus, I need a little time to process how (and that) I just walked 3042 kilometers across France.