There’s (No) Crying in Mascún Canyon!

When I first came to visit Spain with my partner in March of 2019, we visited the family apartment in Biescas in the Pyrenees. Someone, I can’t remember who, gave me a tourist booklet on hikes in Aragón, which is the region where my partner is from and where his family still lives. I perused the booklets, starring the hikes I wanted to do. Of course, many of them were mountains, but others were easier more “dominguero” hikes to fabulous things I don’t see often, or really ever, such as dolmens and cave paintings. As we were in the Pyrenees at that time, my partner was a bit dismayed since many of the things I marked, especially those of more cultural and historic interest, were in the Sierra de Guara and not the Pyrenees.

As luck would have it, the week I reluctantly agreed to climb Aneto, the highest mountain in the Pyrenees, the weather was quite bad in that area, so instead, I happily agreed to go hiking in the Sierra de Guara. We initially planned an easy hike from the village of Rodellar into the Mascún canyon, past a popular climbing area, then up along the other side of the canyon to the abandoned village of Otín before passing the Dolmen de Losa Mora and returning to Rodellar.

When researching the route, my partner found a potential alternative that would take us past the turn-off for the main trail and further up the canyon to another trail leading directly to Otín. It should have been a red flag that most of the information he found on this alternative was from 2013.

Everything started out well enough, descending into the canyon past stunning rock walls that held, in some places, interesting formations; the empty space beneath one arch looked like a dolphin (which has several climbing routes in it). I love going into a canyon. Primarily because I hate going downhill, but, with a canyon, you get all the downhill out of the way early on when the legs are fresh, leaving the fun going up part for the end.

After descending, we turned right and headed along the canyon, away from the trails leading up to the climbing areas. It was smooth walking, made more enjoyable by imaging the shapes in the rock towers rising above us. Before long, we came to the intersection for main trail to the other side of the canyon. However, as planned, we continued deeper into the canyon in search of this alternative route. Soon, the trail became faint, winding through a tangled riverine environment. My poles kept getting caught in the branches and bushes, I could feel every scratchy shrub and prickly plant as they grazed my bare legs, often taking parts of me with them.

Despite having spent a lot of my childhood bushwhacking, or perhaps because of it, I absolutely hate bushwhacking. To me, it feels like being trapped in a cloud of flies that keep getting in your hair, eyes, and mouth; overstimulated and annoyed, you can’t wait to flee and find the space to breathe. This is how the trail continued until the canyon started to get steeper and the river passage widened. Because the water level was quite low, we were able to mostly walk along the river, only having to hop from rock to rock in some places. We stopped for lunch at a particularly enjoyable spot more or less free of bushes, near a tiny waterfall, and also, it turns out, a tiny snake. I’m not comfortable with snakes and especially not with potentially poisonous snakes. I’m also not confident in identifying a viper. I only know that they are small and shy, and I suppose they have triangular heads. I jumped away from my comfortable seat where I was soaking my feet in the river as I saw this tiny little snake slither through the water directly at me. I had to be reassured that it wasn’t a viper before continuing my lunch, but, just in case, I sat a little further from it and didn’t put my feet back in the water.

After lunch, the sides of the canyon became steeper, closer to the river, and the water became deeper. It was impossible to go via the river in places, and in order to avoid the deeper pool, we had to traverse the loose mix of dry soil and small rocks that made up the sloping sides of the canyon. This route is a common exit for canyoners coming from further up the Mascún where there are rappels and large drop-offs, so most people coming out were canyoners, who obviously just swam these pools.

With each of these bypasses, the trails became worse and worse—more exposure, looser combinations of dirt, sand, and rocks, and more eroded. There were some places with unstable scree fields that were impossible to cross, which kept us constantly scouting higher or lower or on the other side of the river to find a way through. I finally just gave up on keeping my feet dry and walked, boots and all, through the shallower pools. Eventually, we reached a near impasse of giant rocks. The canyoners were swimming out from under one of the immense boulders, but there was no other visible way to get across. It seemed like it fit the description for the place in the river where the trail to Otín should diverge, so we tried a trail that we spotted off to the side, but it didn’t pan out. It stopped going up and started going back down the river instead. Worse still, it became almost impossible to follow due to the loose scree. We had to make a choice—go back to the river to search for another way or turn around.

When my partner presented these two options, I knew what my answer would be, what his answer would be, and what the right answer was. We had to go back—back through the exposed, unstable scree, the steep, eroded paths, a couple particularly uncertain traverses, the endless, scratchy bushes. For the past hour or more, I had been holding this inevitability at the front of my thoughts while also aching to find the trail that would take me out of the canyon and onto a comfortable, marked trail where things would be so very easy. This is why, while awaiting my answer, I sat down and cried uncontrollably, snot dripping and unable to speak, thinking about all we had passed that we now had to do yet again.

It’s not that what we had done was particularly hard or all that dangerous, potentially injurious, sure, but not deadly. It’s that every step was a minor but annoying assault that built itself into an unstable tower of uncertainty—Where am I going, and how the hell am I supposed to get there? So I bawled and howled in the loose rock and sand below dramatic canyon walls, not because I had to go back, but because I was so tired of pushing through the uncertainty and difficulty. I missed the ease of my old life.

In the U.S., I used to hike almost every weekend. Most Sundays, I was out like the postal service, rain or shine, with a fabulous hiking club, the Wanderbirds. Sometimes, even on Saturdays, I’d be scouting a hike, doing a training hike for some mountain or trip, or maybe climbing. Very predictable. Since I’ve been in Spain, I’ve really been struggling with enjoying my hikes, and I haven’t quite been able to pinpoint why. It could be the terrain that’s so dry and rocky in many places and completely different to what I’m used to. It could be the trails that are often poorly marked and incessantly crisscrossed with herd trails—cow herds, sheep herds, goat herds, human herds. Perhaps it’s the maps that are so busy with markers of civilization—roads, fire roads, buildings, villages, powerlines—that my mind literally rejects looking too hard at them. Or it could be me, as absorbing yet another change is just too much to take—new language, new work, new climate, new people—leaving me feeling uncomfortable more often than not.

Almost every time I’m hiking here, it feels so incredibly hard to just maintain my usual internal self that any extra effort is too overwhelming, and I run out mental energy to manage, say, exposure or risk. It’s definitely limited my adventurousness and my desire to take on certain challenges on the trails or in the mountains. I’ve been trying to re-adjust by participating in some easier hikes and excursions and leaving my partner to do the tough stuff with others.

This hike was supposed to be one of the easy ones! That is, until we changed the plans. There are about a thousand “should haves” I could insert here, but, in the end, none were going to be useful in that canyon. I did finally stop crying, after disgustingly dripping snot all over my partner’s hand, and said, “Of course we have to go back. It’s the only safe option.”

I braced myself for the return, and surprisingly, what had filled me with dread seemed to pass quickly. My spirits lifted as I cautiously navigated the few tricky areas with my usual confidence and enthusiasm. It felt like just mere minutes had passed before we reached the brushy, final stages of our return. I kept thinking there must be more, preparing myself, but more never came. In fact, during the bushwhacking this time around, my partner remarked, “Maybe because the river flows in this direction, the bushes don’t seem as bad, as if they’re all pointing down river.” Yes, I suppose. After all, they did seem less scratchy. Perhaps we were now moving with the flow of the bushes. Or perhaps we had just habituated ourselves to the pain.