Sunday, March 29, 2015

Depardieu and the wind turbines of Plum

Distance: 9.3 km.  Elevation low/high/total: 6/434/537 m.
Difficulty: 6.5/10.  Scenic: 8.5/10
A solo hike up above the village of Plum to visit their wind farm - click pic for album
The geotrack is linked here(gpx) and here(kml)
Once again I found myself without a hiking partner but my feet were so itchy I just had to get up and out.  Quite often, on my way down south, I pass the lovely little town of Plum - last village before you head into the mountains.  A string of wind turbines can be seen up on the plateau above the village and, turns out, there's a hiking trail to get up there.  So, up I went early on a hot Sunday morning.

My friend Paul later told me this trail was known as the "goat scramble" and it was tough going for awhile.  The trail is quite vertical in places and you haul yourself up hand over foot across sharp rock and brush.  As it's on the lee side of the mountain, the air is rather dead and I lost a lot of water weight (i.e., I sweated like a pig).  But the view up there was spectacular.  The best of all though was my meeting with an unexpected giraffe.  There he stood, proudly surveying the scene beyond the line of wind turbines.  I named him Depardieu because, well .... French, big nose, stoic, gerard le giraffe ... seemed a natural name.  I placed a geocache at his feet (linked here), and then headed back.  There's not really a trail to follow heading back till you're about half way down and can then follow the power lines.  The descent was even trickier in places - loose stones, slippery dirt, the usual.  It was, all in all, a lovely way to spend a weekend day.

ps - I'm in the market for a hiking buddy, as my usual companion is about to leave New Caledonia and start college at Berkeley in a few weeks.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Hiking the GR1 - Stage 2

Distance: 13.0 km.  Elevation low/high/total: 255/602/694 m.
Difficulty: 6.0/10.  Scenic: 6.5/10


A 10.8 km hike, though with entry and exit, was a total of 13 km long
click picture to see picture album, here is the link to the geotrack
Finally, Finally!, everything came together so that Miss K and I could tackle the second leg of the New Caledonia Grande RandonĂ©e, otherwise know as the GR1.  She's leaving in 6 weeks or so and we have 6 stages still to do!  The difficulty with arranging this hike is that ideally we would have two vehicles so we could park one at each end and skip the hitchhiking that was necessitated in Stage 1 (when we had two cars but parked in the wrong place).  However, we were not able to find companion hikers so based on my confidence things would work out, off we went in the Frog.

And, you know what, things worked out WAY better, than they had for Stage 1.  We parked at the access road for the southern entry point, hiked 2.2 km in to the official start of Stage 2 and off we went.   The weather was pleasant, not too hot, often breezy, a bit of rain at times and the main 10.8 km section took about 3.5 hours to accomplish.  The main item of note was the intense interaction we had with several extremely large spiders along the way.  I was walking point and twice I felt spider web suddenly across my face and spinning around saw Kincso walking in the same, now stretched, web with a giant resident spider only inches from her face.  I figure I saved her life at least twice, maybe thrice.  There's a bit of spider in the pics and video.  Of course, we placed another geocache (link here) as is our intent for each stage.

Once we hit the main road and started hitchhiking while walking the start of the 8 km return trek to our jeep, it wasn't too long before a kindly family stopped and picked us up.  Next week, we hope to tackle Stage 3 which is one of the longest toughest legs (19.5 km) and tentatively have co-hikers lined up as hitchhiking in that stretch of the GR1 would be nigh impossible.