Sierra Nevada
Emily Woodhouse heads for the sun-scorched peaks and razorback ridges of Spain’s Sierra Nevada with a personal goal: to turn a hiking holiday into a world record-breaking adventure
Emily Woodhouse undertakes a record-breaking ‘Spanish stroll’
“They say that adventure is just bad planning. But I believe that adventures start as soon as you step off the paper and into reality”
“SEÑORITA, NO ES LA ROUTA.”
Ten years on from my GCSE Spanish, the message was still clear. The concrete track I was walking down would not take me to the mountains. The tanned man watering his vegetables looked up in surprise at the boot-clad tourist marching towards his back garden. Oops. I back-tracked and escaped, using by far the most useful phrase of the trip: “Lo siento, soy inglesa.”
Defying all expectations, I was at the foot of Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Alone, with eight days of food in my 60-litre rucksack, I was ready to spend a week walking and camping at altitude, in a place I’d never been before. The closest
I’d ever got was gazing at the distant snowy peaks on a school trip to Granada, while studiously avoiding speaking Spanish. Now I was going to explore the mountains in full. I had a unique, self-designed route and a strict schedule. If only I could get out of town and into the national park…
DÉJÀ VU
As I walked down the slope of Cerro Pelado, my first 3000m peak, I was struck by a strange sensation. I recognised the view. A broad shale ridge, brown verging on grey in the sunshine, with barely any grass. With exciting crags on either side, it snaked away into the distance, dark blue silhouettes of mountains higher still just visible behind. So thorough was my preparation that I’d seen a picture of this very view. I could point out the peaks that I’d obsessed over on the map, like we already knew each other. Maybe I did have it covered.
The Sierra Nevada is not a popular or busy range by any means, despite containing mainland Spain’s highest mountain. Unlike the Picos or the Pyrenees, there are no long-distance trails or waymarked routes. It is most well-known for its ski resort on the slopes of Veleta. With the packed beaches of the Costa del Sol just around the corner, it’s a wonder that the mountains are so overlooked.
If you were going to visit the Sierra
Nevada in summer, you’d most likely do the Integral: a traverse of all the main 3000m peaks from north-east to southwest. Gazing down that ridgeline from Cerro Pelado, it looked fantastic. Peak after peak along a clear line, getting gradually higher into the sunset. But I was doing something even more obscure.
Back when ‘pandemic’ was an abstract sort of word you pulled out for Hangman or Scrabble, I was plotting how to spend my annual leave in 2020. Generally uninspired, I thought it might be fun to try to get a Guinness World Record. You know, find the simplest and most direct route to a gold star that every ‘Adventurer’ has on their CV. Turn something as practical and straightforward as a walking holiday into what others might bill as ‘Epic’. It would be a bit of a laugh. Years ago, I might have looked up in awe at any and all world record holders. But the more time I spend in the adventure industry, the more achievable it all seems. It’s just about choosing the right record.
Once I’d found a record I thought I had a chance at beating – climbing the most 3000m mountains in a week – I settled on the Sierra Nevada as the best way to stack the odds in my favour. They are nontechnical and snow-free in summer, with easy access from the UK. Never mind a high concentration of qualifying peaks in a small area.
To convince myself it would be do-able, I immersed myself in all I could find about the mountains. Cicerone had a guidebook, so I read it. A map or two allowed me to see the bigger picture. Online, I could find only two people who’d walked the Integral in the last 10 years and blogged about it. But these two were Ronald Turnbull and Chiz Dakin, so their words and photos were both useful and insightful.
Beyond that, I narrowed it down to a specific route. I numbered peaks on a map and joined them together using as many known sections as I could. I tried to find side-on photos of the mountains to check terrain. I used Google Earth to scrutinise sections I was unsure about and found videos of people climbing the major peaks. I even emailed a local guide, who was helping with my transport, to check a couple of very specific details: can this mountain be approached from this side? It is incredible how much information we can access about an unknown (to us) area.
I probably overdid the planning. But being alone with a potential record on the line, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Not that it’s possible to eliminate chance from any trip to the mountains.
“The solitude was beautiful. One evening, I spent the hour before dark listening to the scree slowly falling off Mulhacén into the silence.”
But I wanted to give myself as much help as I could before I started. The walking would be hard enough. And, of course, the best-laid plans can be scuppered by the smallest thing. Get the wrong weather and be blown off the mountainside or spend days in the fog. Arrive in person to discover an assumption you made online was unfounded. My walk was no exception.
CHANGING TACK
After a full day of slogging up Cerro Pelado from civilisation, I descended across a chunky scree slope to camp by the laguna.
My fancy borrowed GPS watch was reading over 30ºC at 3000m. From 2500m there was nowhere to hide in the shade – except an occasional boulder. The landscape was lunar. My bag felt heavy and my recordkeeping altimeter was playing up. Unsure if I’d wasted my day entirely, I settled down near the lake and rehydrated dinner. Then I pitched my tent, corners pinned out with small piles of rocks, and crawled inside.
From inside my tent, by the light of the rising full moon, I completely replanned my route for the week. Not only was I going too slowly, I was concerned about the unusual heat. I’d been expecting a good 10 degrees cooler and I was drinking litres more water than I’d thought. Making regular water sources my priority, I cut mercilessly down from the ambitious 25 peaks to just 14. Across the top of my home-laminated route card, I’d scribbled a message in capital letters to my future self. The red Sharpie was unequivocal: you only need to do eight. Eight would make me a world record holder and tick the arbitrary box for this expedition. Anything else was ego and against the principle of ‘simplest possible’ solution. Extra was only
allowed if it was still fun (albeit potentially in the Type 2 sense).
The fact that I could do that on the fly, hunched in a small tent with just a map, is testament to the time I spent planning. If you’re going off the beaten track, it pays to be better prepared than normal. Especially somewhere new. Route fixed, I curled up in my sleeping bag. Sadly, my focus had been more on the walking than the sleeping. As night fell, the wind picked up and funneled into the valley. My tent shook the whole night and was kept in place mostly because I was lying in it.
Not the most promising start.
Soon I settled into a rhythm of two summits a day: one early morning, one mid-afternoon. The days were overwhelmingly hot and dry and still. The sunsets were red, the mornings golden.
The mountains were almost empty until I reached the more accessible peaks like Mulhacén and Veleta. The solitude was beautiful. One evening, I spent the hour before dark listening to the scree slowly falling off Mulhacén into the silence.
The Goterón ridge and Pico de Juego Bolos were stand-out favourites – a ridge like an upturned rib cage and a peak like a viewing platform over the sheer Rio Real valley. But, overwhelmingly, I spent most of my time hauling my life and evidence-collecting gear up and down slopes either side of the main ridgeline. Because, yes, there is a minimum vertical ascent for it to ‘count’ as a peak in Guinness World Record’s books. By the end of the week I was coated in a layer of brown-orange dust, sweat and suncream. In fact, it got so bad that I actually had to take my sunglasses off to be able to see properly.
I’d recommend the Sierra Nevada range to anyone who likes a Grade 1 scramble before breakfast. They are like the Cuillin without the midges and with generally better weather. The bits of the main Integral route I did were fantastic. I guess the thing about beaten paths is that often there’s a reason they’re so popular. Sometimes that reason is they’re the best bit. Everyone wants a slice of the action. I would much rather have been on that sweeping ridgeline than where I actually walked – and I’d definitely go back again to do it. Sure, that wasn’t the point of the trip; but by the end it was depressing to be so near what was clearly a great day out and deliberately avoiding it. To paraphrase Robert Frost, I took the road less travelled by and that made all the difference.
ELEMENT OF SURPRISE
There were plenty of surprises that not even my stringent planning could account for. Most memorable was the scrambling. Google Earth has a tendency to flatten out scrambly ridges into smooth, pixellated slopes. Some were short and pleasant Grade 1 sections. Then there was Puntal de la Caldera. This 3219m mountain is a steep pyramid with an extremely exposed northern edge, dropping a thousand metres into the valley below. A scrambling guidebook would probably describe my route along that crest as “bold and airy”, but it felt exceedingly sketchy in a top-heavy expedition pack. On the map, it was a friendly red line, no different to a footpath. I picked my way across worse and worse terrain to what looked like the highest rock, in a mountain made of a jumbled pile of boulders. As soon as the evidence was recorded, I made a hasty retreat off south.
I knew to expect dry rivers, but the extent took me off guard. You couldn’t rely on even more major rivers to actually be there. Eventually, running out of water cost me a peak. Crags were often not explicitly marked, and I left with a full appreciation for UK maps and the level of accuracy and detail we take for granted. My stove decided to go on strike and I found myself eating cold-soaked apple porridge on the last night. And nothing could prepare me for the strangeness of crossing a ski resort in arid midsummer heat. I trudged across barren gravel slopes between giant plastic sea creatures. Past the octopus, left behind the grinning shark tunnel. At lunch, I sheltered in the shade of a tortoise many times my size.
They say that adventure is just bad planning. But I believe that adventures start as soon as you step off the paper and into reality. You can plan as long as you like and still be surprised. No matter what you do, there will always be elements out of your control. Modern technology gives us an incredibly detailed picture of what to expect from a new area. It allows us to go further off-piste and not just restrict ourselves to popular tracks, waymarked trails and guidebook routes. Sure, there’s a place for that. But it’s not nearly so difficult as you’d imagine to create a route of your own. There’s no need to stick to the beaten path if you don’t want to.