This time Sabriñita is normal. Beño is in italics. Keeping you on your toes.

We peeled outta desert country early in the morning, with a six hour drive ahead of us. That’s a long stint in the car, no matter how pretty the view through the window, so we’d picked out a random three-hour hike located around the halfway point. I knew very little about it, just that it had a lookout over a gorge, and had the course map downloaded to my watch. SEE? USEFUL.

It can do all that and more! At any rate, it guided us off the highway. We drove up a great wedge of land tilting up to a deep blue sky. There were a couple tiny villages consisting of a church and a dozen stone cottages. Soon we reached a gravel pullout with a handful of other vehicles.

Unfurling our cramped legs from the car, we looked out at the impressive valley stretched out below us. Stuffing a few snacks into our faces (I, the expert, ate easily thrice the amount of cherries than Ben but that’s what he gets for chewing with care), we headed up a forested trail. We passed through a meadow perfumed with blossoms and cow patties before emerging at a cliff edge. “Turn left” the watch urged, quite unnecessarily.

I haven’t been on land quite like this before. A bucolic patchwork of cow-mown grass, little streams, and oak forest blankets the whole area, as if it was a single uniform plain. But it isn’t. There is a hundred metre high discontinuity. Viewed from above it forms a V, as if some mythical giant wielding a five-kilometre long pie lifter had scooped out a slice.

We followed the cliff edge towards the corner of the V. It undulated up and down, but generally climbed. Gradually I began to hear a faint sound. Distant voices? Music? It grew louder and steadier. Cow bells!

My heart stuttered. A herd of horses (plus a few cows) were grazing directly in our path. As a lifelong card-wielding member of the “Horse Girl” club, I was freaking out inside that we’d stumbled upon and would be walking among these pot-bellied beauties. I was also a liiiitle nervous about spooking them and being run off the cliff by some territorial stallion. But we passed peaceably. I was still riding that high all the way to the mirador (lookout).

Would you say there were some roans in the herd?

Something’s happening and it frightens me but yes there were some roans (my favourite colour horse) there…

Good thing we didn’t spook them or we’d have been hit by roaning charges.

Christ in heaven, give me strength.

The mirador was a short way from the corner of the V, up the other side. The lookout platform is built out over the escarpment. Leaning over the fence, there is a lot of air underneath you. It was here that I discovered that I was no longer desensitized to seeing Sabrina at a precipice. My insides gave a lurch seeing her above a fall that might last more than ten seconds. We really have to restart climbing so I can get used to her dangling off cliffs again.

I turned away from that awful sight to find a nice rock to sit on far back from the mirador. Even though I wasn’t looking, I could hear her laughing, perhaps at the thrill of the view, or perhaps at her scaredy-cat husband.

Well the view wasn’t cracking jokes; that’s all I’ll say about that. The day was getting hotter and there were more people milling about here so we started back after scarfing a ham and cheese sandwich each (side note: the Spanish LOVE their ham sandwiches. Ham for breakfast. Ham for lunch. Ham for dinner. Ham tapas. They’d probably concoct a ham drink if God didn’t step in and say “no, seriously, that’s enough ham.”)

The route Sabrina planned took us on a wide loop back to the car. Refreshed, we started the second leg of our drive. With about an hour to go, the Pacific Ocean burst into view. We drove west, squeezed between the increasingly impressive Picos on our left and the blue Bay of Biscay on our right, and then we wheeled left into the Urrieles Massif the very heart of the Picos de Europa. Mountain roads are narrow, and winding. So are European roads. Combine the two and you get a challenging drive, to say the least.

Any time a car would appear behind me I’d get stressed out that I was slowing everyone down and that someone would get impatient and try a dangerous pass, even though I was mostly going the speed limit. We were passing these gorgeous views and Ben would ooo and ahh but my eyes were glued onto the next turn.

But! We eventually arrived. Poncebos was the last town (if you can call it that) on the road, and the most convenient starting point for some of the best trails on this side of the Picos. We checked into a hostel that overlooked the river, with towering sheets of rock hemming us in on all sides.

Every side a sheer wall of blue-grey limestone, mostly vertical or overhanging. We were at the bottom of a twisting network of intersecting canyons, a natural labyrinth carved by the mountain torrents. “This is better than Yosemite,” I murmured to Sabrina.

For a bit of context: when we visited Yosemite he’d said it was ten times better than Jasper.

Let me try to explain. This jumble of walls and spires must have been the inspiration for Gaudi’s Sagrada. Magnificent as his cathedral is, it’s a pale imitation, a tame and scaled-down simplification of this stone metropolis.

You don’t understand, I’m not making myself clear, it’s unbelievably pointy. We’re in the lower jaw of some colossal dragon skull, surrounded by serrated fangs stretching up to puncture the sky.

We weren’t sure which hike to do first. The weather for the next two days was showing clear mornings but rainy afternoons. After negotiating Ben to a 7am start, we decided that for our first hike in the Picos, we’d go high.

A gloomy night gave way to a clear morning. My hopes soared as we walked away from the hostel to see alpenglow hit the peaks against blue sky. We had our sights set on Refugio Terenosa, a high elevation hut that supposedly served light lunches. The trail began with a bang: from the road, we turned left into a precipitous gorge. It’s narrow enough that I can’t imagine it receives direct sun for more than a few hours of the day, but leads directly to the tiny, roadless hamlet of Bulnes.

About an hour of sweaty grinding and we arrived to find the place still asleep.

There’s now a funicular that speeds people up the mountain from Poncebos to Bulnes, but it doesn’t start until 10am.

The only other people astir in Bulnes were a couple Brits who had been to Urriellu yesterday. We swapped info and said farewell. I regretted not talking a bit more and finding out where they had come from and why. I resolved that I would try to talk to English-speakers when I could to make the vacation less of an island with a population of two.

From there, a muddy ascent into alpine pastureland. We had the trail to ourselves, save for the tinkle and clang of cow bells on nearby hillsides. As we left the trees behind, the landscape widened, revealing a scattering of ruins and in the distance: our main goal for the day. Refugio Terenosa sits on a quaint hillside (though that doesn’t say much; a LOT of the things here sit on quaint hillsides). We hoped to eat and then if we had gas left in the tank, make a go at the base of Pico Urrielu.

The tank didn’t have much gas after all. We figured we’d be passing a town and a Refugio so we only took four litres of water and a half-day’s worth of food. As we hadn’t added to our stores in Bulnes, we were relying on the Refugio being open to supply a long day. You see where this is going. Terenosa was locked tight with a note on the door saying Hasta Jueves. Urriellu, our stretch goal, was out. The question was now whether to go back the way we came or a longer loop to another town and end with a seven kilometre road walk to Poncebos.

We hate road walks. That said, I didn’t love the idea of turning around “so early,” even though we’d already been hiking for hours. But when we went a little higher, just to poke our noses over the hill to get a peak at the path to Urriellu, the skies were dark and the clouds were moving in to choke the pass. The turnaround was softened by a bracing hug from Ben and the fact that we took a slightly different way down, through a lovely flower field.

As we got closer to Bulnes, we began passing people also on the way down. Most seemed like day trippers who had taken the funicular up from Poncebos, but some may have come from Sotres or even Urriellu. We thought the descent was painstaking as we carefully picked our way down the slick, stony path, but we passed perhaps 20 people (and were in turn passed by a couple trail runners).

I couldn’t believe how fast they were flying down these extremely technical trails.

The thing I am always struck by in these long-distance mountain runners is the gaunt, haunted looks in their faces.

You see it every morning when you open your eyes, darling.

When we got to Bulnes, it was going to mean an hour of waiting in order to take the funicular (siesta!) and our legs felt like they had about an hour left in them so we headed back down the gorge. The hard, stony trail made us glad that we hadn’t gone for the route with the road walk. We stumbled into the hostel’s restaurant craving hamburgers. Instead we got ‘bocadillos,’ which ended up being the most bread-dominant sandwich of my life.

We munched our breadwiches on the patio in the late afternoon. I was tired and deeply content from my first day in the Picos.