On Saturday at noon, he was able to say "Good morning" to them from the summit of Catalunya, Pica d'Estats. Allow me to explain, still reeling from the euphoria of having achieved it, because on Pica, Neil Armstrong's words speak volumes when he said he didn't just want to be the first human to go to the moon, but the first to go there and back. On Pica, the descent is as hard, if not harder, than the climb, full of scree and banks you have to climb when you're already exhausted from the day's effort, which turns the final stretch into both a physical and mental test.
Aside from the internal dialogue that inevitably erupts during the long hours of the trek, the magnitude of the landscape and the distance from any of those elements that make our daily lives more comfortable bring you back to your clean, bare human condition. There, there is only the mountain and the group climbing it. It seems as if the world and its problems have been left behind in the Molinassa parking lot, twelve kilometers from Àreu, the last village in the Ferrera Valley before the ascent.
We weren't alone, of course. At the summit cross, we had to ask for a photo opportunity for the conquest. I had climbed 23 years ago, with the parents from my eldest son's school, and then I promised my youngest daughter that one day we would do it again, a promise I reminded myself of a few times on Saturday, but without which (and without both of our company) I wouldn't have returned. During the downturn, a hiker asked me how many times I had done the Pica. "Two," I proudly replied. "I do it 25 times," he said. "I do it every year." He was a reader of the ARA, so I renew my admiration for him in writing.
