Back in 1985 BS (Before Stomach), I was camping just outside Luz-St-Sauveur in the Hautes-Pyrénées, ostensibly working on a guidebook to '100 Walks in the French Pyrenees' for Hodder and Stoughton.
Those were the days when, as my mother puts it, I had a proper job, working in local government, although I came to look on said job as a 30-year prison sentence for a crime I hadn't yet committed. But at least it gave me enough annual leave, spread over three rather agreeable years, to dash around at high altitude in the south of France, day after day as I worked on the book.
Anyway, the object of this particular day's exercise was a noble wall of rock, Le Taillon by name, part of the headwall of the Cirque de Gavarnie, a huge glacial scoop into the north face of a 3000-metre high sleeping policeman that separates France from Spain. Admittedly, Le Taillon (3,144m/10,315 feet) is generally considered one of the easiest 3,000-metre summits, and, for me, a good place to start eating into this section of the guide, given that I would have to romp most of the way up it again to tackle the higher and significantly more demanding summit, Pic du Marboré, to the east.
At some dark hour that probably doesn't exist in the real world, I poked my head out of the tent, carelessly disturbing my wife in the process,. She, being fluent in scatological profanity, muttered: 'Pah-ishti-wugger-muff', which I freely translated as 'Good morning, darling'. I was tempted to smile, but it was gloom that settled on my face as I saw the base layer of clouds little more than a hundred feet above my head. Go back to sleep, sweet one.
But later that day, from the outskirts of
Argelès-Gazost I realised my mistake.
One look down the valley, the Gave de Gavarnie, told me that I had forgotten about temperature inversion, a weird weather technique that presses clouds into the valleys and leaves all the pointy bits poking upwards into a cerulean blue dome.
It was not a mistake that would hinder the next day's preparations, and we hastened to pack gear into the car and head off to Gavarnie, and from there by a delightful serpentine road up through the clouds and into the bright blue sky, all the way to the Col du Boucharro where I parked my car amid an untidy abandonment of others and amused myself quietly by walking the 100 metres into Spain – no passport required.
Back at my car, my wife was pulling on her boots, packing a day sack and generally getting ready to wake up.