Mike at the pimple
This all started with an ambition of Mikes. Every morning for the past 5 years he has jumped out of bed, pulled the curtains back and stared at the pimple. Most folk would have gone to the doctors after looking at a pimple for 5 years, but Mikes pimple is a small outcrop of rocks on the side of Caballo, a big hill in the Sierra Nevada range of mountains. There are other mountain tops more imposing in the Sierra Nevada but he can’t see those. He wanted to go to the pimple, measure it’s altitude and be able to say to Juan his next door neighbour “I have been there”. When Mike first mentioned this burning ambition to go to the pimple it was winter, and Caballo was covered in snow, at 3011 metres it gets a lot of snow in winter. As spring approached Mike was tasked with giving a snow report each week. It was mid June when he reported that the pimple was clear of snow, we could now plan our ascent. It seemed a bit of a waste to spend all that energy just to visit the pimple, and we have been to the summit of Caballo before, so we decided to go a bit further and go to the Laguna del Caballo, a lake we have looked down on but not visited. Mike had lent me a book with pictures of all the Lagunas in the Sierra Nevada, and it looke like it might be fun to visit as many as possible in the summer when it was too warm to walk on the Sulayr track, our 300 km walk we had started earlier this year.
We all met in the Nigúelas carpark at 7.30 to drive as far as possible up the side of Caballo. The track is rough and progress was slow, but after 1 hour we had climbed up to 2175 metres and could go no further due to a chain across the road. This would be our starting point, it was a beautiful day and at this altitude the air is cool and fresh. To start with the path follows a forest road before cutting off across country heading for the ridge line that heads straight up Caballo. The path is little used and indistinct but you can't get lost, you just keeping heading over a series of little summits. So unusual was our little party that the mountain goats just stood on the rocks staring at us as we passed by. After 3 hours of walking Mike announced that we had reached the pimple by the simple expedient of if we went any further we would not be able to see is house in the valley far below us. At 2757 metres Mike’s pile of rocks is not named on the map but he did not care, he had got there.
From this point it is a simple matter to continue on what now turned into a very good path coming up from Lanjaron, heading for the Laguna Caballo. We were now in the snow line and we had a number of snow filled gullies to cross as we made our way to the Laguna. The views were stunning as we could see the range of hills going up to Veleta.
There is a small Refugio by the side of the Laguna and we stopped here for lunch before heading off back to the car on a slightly different route.
We finished off the walk in Migúels bar in Nigúelas with cold beer and his excellent tapas.
Mike’s neighbour Juan was not impressed when Mike told him where he had been, it just confirmed his suspicions that all the English are loco en la cabeza.
On the walk Mike, Kees, Ray, Mark, and myself
Distance covered 14.5 km, height climbed 852 metres, maximum altitude 2841 metres.
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