31 May Section 18 Peña Patida ?

We had big hopes for our walk this week, it is described in the book as being the most spectacular and attractive section of the walk and I did not want Graham to miss out on this bit of it when he returns to the UK next week to draw his first pension down at the Post Office. We planned to do Section 18 from Peña Partida down to the Refugio Vivac El Calvario.  It seemed a shame that Rene would miss out after having endured our previous days out, but we had a full team of boys this week. The biggest obstacle for more than 5 people doing the walk is suitable vehicles to get to up to the Sulayr path, generally it needs something with good ground clearance. As we were passing through Gúéjar Sierra we thought it was a good idea to issue an invitation to Mark to join us on one of our adventures, and he does have a car that can get up the campo tracks. This would also allow Rene to come along as the token girl and to keep us under control. So with 2 cars we made our way to Marks house where we exchanged vehicles and set off again, with the Tomtom set on our final destination. On other occasions, when we have used it, it has done a superb job of finding the route, but in Gúéjar I suspect that due to the steep sided valley she missed the turning (notice now it is SHE missed the turning) fortunately Mark knew the route so we followed him instead. The road up to Peña Partida is about 20km long and climbs some 1200 metres along the way. The higher we climbed the more spectacular the views became, at times it felt you could touch all the surrounding 3000 metre mountains. Some 6km short of our destination our progress came to an abrupt halt, a substantial chain was strung across the road, this gave us no option but to park up and walk.
We had originally planned to walk about 15 km with a steep 600 metre climb on the way back, so adding another 12km and 400 metres of ascent was really going to push the walk to the limit. We followed the road and soon arrived at the refugio at Peña Partida and we were surprised to find another group of walkers already there, it was a bigger surprise to find that they were English and that they were planning to go up onto the 3000 metre ridge. By now the clear weather, that we had set off with, was starting to cloud over a bit, so we decided to abandon our planned route, on section 18 and do a shorter walk on section 17. Unfortunately, we had not brought the map showing the path for section 17 and the route out of the Refugio was not way marked, but there was a very good path heading in approximately the right direction, the only problem was it was going up and we should have been going down, but with no other obvious route we set off to follow the path, it did not really matter where we went. We were above the snow line and the views were stunning, we had Veleta, Mulhacen and Alcazaba at our finger tips.
Arriving at a point above the valley of the Lavaderos de la Reina, and with our path continuing to climb, we decided to drop down and investigate this very popular area. The Sulayr path crosses this valley and we hoped we could find a trace of it. With the clouds starting to roll in and finding no sign of the path we decided to make our way back to the Refugio for lunch. Having abandoned our plans to knock some miles off our walk we started to make our way back to the cars, this is when we discovered an unmarked path, following it for about 100 metres we came across 2 Sulayr marker posts, I will have to write to Enreke about this one. Returning to our homeward track we found a new path that skirted along the top of the Estrella gorge and gave us superb views all the way back to the cars. We were not really entitled to a celebratory beer after our walk this week, so we went round to Marks, for a cup of tea instead. All was not lost, we did walk a section of our route. Yes I know spending a full day walking and actually managing to knock off 100 metres is not what us mountain men are used to, but at least we can look forward to doing this section again in the future. A good day out, a fantastic area.
The walkers Mike, Kees, Rene, Graham, Ray, Mark and myself.
Distance walked on route today, 0.1 km. Total distance today 15.7 km. Height climbed today 512 metres. Total distance walked on the Sulayr path 79.2 km. Distance left to do 220.8 km. Total height climbed 6312 metres. Total distance walked 202.2 km.