Long days on foot, and four ways to reserve a mountain walking week in Europe
Three questions ago you told us that somebody outside the trip fixes the dates, that the somebody is a person and not a date, and that this person can walk all day without being asked twice. Four weeks survive that. If you want to reserve a mountain walking week in Europe, these are the four we would put in front of you, and one of them we would tell you to arrange without us.
- Long days on the Kerry ridgesfrom $2,720 per personyou could arrange most of it yourself
- Pass to pass in the Dolomitesfrom $3,140 per personthe hard half needs a telephone call
- Three days across the Picosfrom $2,880 per personthe hard half needs a telephone call
- A week of long days in Jotunheimenfrom $3,560 per personit does not exist without an introduction
One unbroken stroke means you could do all of it yourself. Four pieces mean it does not exist without an introduction. The written words beside the mark say the same thing, so the mark never carries the meaning alone.
What the four have in common, and it is not the walking
The walking is the part everybody assumes is the difficulty, and it is the part we spend the least time on. What these four actually share is that the walking is the fixed thing and every other part of the week has to bend around it. Seven to nine hours on your feet on the days that matter means you are not the one carrying the bag, you do not arrive at an hour of your choosing, and you do not decide over breakfast where you will sleep. So each of the four is built backward from a bed. Somebody has to hold it, somebody has to feed you after the hour a kitchen would ordinarily close, and in three of the four somebody has to drive your luggage to it along a road that goes nowhere near your route. Nine, ten, nine and eight nights. Two, four, three and three beds. Every one of them contains at least one day on which the path and the road part company for all the daylight there is, and that day is the one we plan first and the one most likely to need a second version.
Where they differ, in the only way that changes your week
Set the four side by side and the thing that decides your week is not the country, it is the number printed against it. Ireland is a two bed week, nine nights, one house near the coast and one on the inland side of the ridges, and the number against it is two, meaning most of it is yours to arrange with about six telephone calls, one of them in the evening because that is when the person picks up. Italy runs pass to pass, ten nights and four beds, and it carries a three: the hard half is a set of calls to wardens who take reservations by voice on particular days and not otherwise. Spain is nine nights and three beds, with three of those days spent crossing rather than circling, so your bag travels by road and you do not; it carries a three as well, and the hard half is that road, which has to be arranged by voice against the walking days rather than against the calendar. Norway is eight nights, three beds and a four: the last bed in the chain is held back from the public system by a warden who fills it from a list she keeps herself, and there is no version of that week a stranger can assemble off a screen. The money moves with the arrangement rather than with the scenery: $2,720, $3,140, $2,880 and $3,560.
Three questions we ask before a single bed is held
Three things go wrong in this corner often enough that we ask about them before anything else. The first is that one person answered the walking question on behalf of four. So we ask for the longest day the slowest member of your party has done in the past two years, in hours, on ground with a gradient in it, and we ask who else was there. Adjectives are no use to us; an hour we can plan against. The second is arrival time. A party that walks nine hours plans the climb and forgets that coming off the mountain takes three more, and the kitchen at the far end shuts at a stated hour whether anyone is sitting in it or not. We build each day backward from that hour and give you the last sensible time to leave the high ground, which is usually earlier than people care for. The third is weather, and about weather we can do nothing except be ready in advance. We cannot tell you a col will be open. We can write the low route onto the same sheet of paper before you leave, and mark which of your nights can be moved with one telephone call and which are fixed because somebody is holding a bed on the strength of our asking.
Before you pick one of the four
We are four people and one of us is slower. Does that rule these out?
No, but it decides which of the four. The difference between a party that walks at one speed and a party with a range in it is not distance, it is daylight. Give us the slowest recent day in hours and we will tell you which weeks have days you can cut short at a marked junction and which have days that commit you once you have started up. Two of the four have a way off halfway through the long days. The Norwegian week has one on two days out of six. We would sooner move you onto a different week than have you hurrying down a descent in poor light.
You say we could arrange the Irish week ourselves. Why print that?
Because it is true, and because you would work it out yourself somewhere around the third call. Ireland in that season has beds, buses and people who answer the telephone, and nine nights across two houses is within reach of anybody willing to give up an evening to it. What we are selling on that week is not access, it is somebody else making the calls and standing behind the answer. If that is not worth having, take the two houses and the order of the ridges off this page and do it yourself. We will not mind, and we will still pick up if the second house falls through in June.
Who takes our money for these weeks?
Not us. We hold no card details and we send you no invoice. The houses, the refuges and the road transport charge you on their own terms and their own dates, and a good while after you are home they settle a fee with us out of their end of it. That plainly gives us a reason to want you to reserve something, which is the whole reason the number against each week is printed at all, and why one of these four says most of it is yours to do. Your flights are yours to buy: we arrange no carriage by air or sea and we hold a contract with no carrier.