Somport Pass/Aragon Route early May 2001

[Donald Schell]

continued from today's previous note:

The Aragon countryside reminded me of the mountains of Northern New Mexico
in spring time.  From  what I'd read I'd expected something much harsher.
It's a landscape to delight a Westerner's heart, and it was decked in spring
glory.  Tiny white and blue wildflowers carpeted the ground underfoot.
Densely blossoming yellows of Spanish broom covered the hills and brushed
our legs where the path was narrow, and we saw the first of the red poppies
that would become more and more profuse each day we walked.  Butterflies in
even more colors than the flowers were everywhere.  Overhead we watched
hawks in reds, browns and whites, black vultures, and songbirds that passed
by so fast we could only glimpse their colors.  Most of that day we looked
out over the Aragon River in its valley below us.    For a half hour or more
our overhead scene included a whining small plane doing endless
loop-the-oops, outside rolls, vertical climbs, stalls and dives.  And though
never saw the birds themselves, we heard cuckoos calling almost without
pause through that day and the next two.  Imagination longs for walking such
spring days.

About four-thirty we crossed the bridge at Puenta La Reina de Jaca (arches
of the medieval bridge bridge evident beneath a modern roadway; the bridge
had been widened to accommodate modern traffic, but trucks and buses made it
one way and a little anxious for walkers).  We walked through the town and
up a hill on the other end of it to find the bakery where we bought bread,
local cheese, and some canned fish.  Then we crossed back to complete our
walk to Arres.

The last three kilometers seemed long, as final kilometers of a day often
do.  We wound along a narrow trail on the shoulders of a fairly steep
hillside.  The path twisted between scratchy low mesquite-like scrub and
Spanish broom that felt to me as though it were cheering us on.  Finally we
rounded a turn in the path and Arres appeared a few hundred meters ahead, a
twelve-hundred year old village on a hilltop.


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