Chapter 18: Bikepacking the Altravesur-Pampaneira to Trevelez

9th May 2019

You can see my YouTube on this ride here

I left Pampaneira around 8 or 9 Thursday morning, it seems the whole village closes on Thursday and I couldn’t get any breakfast. So I set-off looking for the camino to Bubión. After half an hour I was high above Pampaneira but I couldn’t find the camino. I decided I wasn't going to waste any more time looking for the way to go, and started to descend through the village to take the surfaced road. On my way down I found the 'camino' which was in fact a narrow mule trail.

I’d earlier asked a guy where the camino was, but couldn’t follow his directions. He had said I shouldn’t take the camino with a bike, and that it was ‘muy complicado’. And he wasn’t kidding, the first few hundred metres are overgrown with thistles, narrow, with a three metre drop to the side.

Once past the overgrown part it was clear this was a singletrack, steep, rocky mule trail. These mule and goat trails have stones set into the soil on their end, so they stick upwards, not flat like cobble stones. This was hard work, it took every ounce of my energy to get up this. At one point I was ready to turn back, it was that difficult. So very steep. And the fact that my trainers had no tread left didn’t help with getting traction to push the bike up, over large rocks. At one point I heard myself saying out loud ‘you’ve got this fuck-face’ hahaha it was just so very hard, especially with no calories inside me and the sun rising in the sky.