HRP - Haute Randonnée Pyrénéenne

Distance

760 km

Time

17 days

Elevation Gain

44,260m

Dare I say it, but as I approached the top of the ridge and saw what lay in front of me, I felt a bit emotional. Bloody Snowflake. 10km in the distance below the Atlantic lay shimmering away in the evening light, flanked either side by far reaching views up and down the coastline. I knew I was nearing the end of my journey but somehow, I hadn’t gotten around to envisioning the end yet, and certainly not by giving it much more than a passing shrug. But there it was - a scene I had seen a thousand times before since I was little - the sight of the sun slowly sinking into the Atlantic Ocean. It paradoxically felt both comfortingly familiar but also quite poignant at the same time, given the last couple of weeks getting here.

17 days previously I had left the sun-kissed shore of the Mediterranean and embarked on a circa 800km trail run across the Pyrenees, heading west towards the Atlantic. The route stayed high and traversed endless boulder fields, scree slopes, high-mountain passes, alpine lakes and meadows. I was following the Haute Randonnée Pyrénéenne (HRP), more of a concept than an actual trail, which takes one through the Pyrenean Mountain range using the highest feasible walking route, criss-crossing the French-Spanish border countless times a day.
For reasons not entirely clear to me, I decided this one would be a good one to run, so I took a trail running backpack, minimal gear and went for it. Ok, not everyone’s idea of fun, but a twistedly brutally exhilarating, yes-I’m-definitely-still-alive-kind-of-fun, that for some inexplicable reason I just can’t get enough of.
Sitting under my tarp looking out at the thunder storm far out to sea I began to process the last couple of weeks. I’ve never done a trail quite like the HRP – the terrain is ruthlessly unforgiving - I can’t recall any let up from the relentless ascents and descents - just summit after summit, ridge after ridge. Either you’re going up, or you’re going down. But the reward for such demanding geography was almost 800km of unbroken beauty that literally and figuratively took the breath away. One of the toughest routes I’ve faced, given the timescale, but also one I will remember forever.