Pico de Aneto
PICO DE ANETO
For some reason, I found myself catching up with Nick – the guy I had dated for a few weeks the previous year and fallen for hard, only for him to end things abruptly with the vaguest of explanations.
He told me all about his life and recent romantic endeavours. Apparently, he now wanted to settle down and perhaps start thinking about building a family. Then he asked about my love life, and somehow the conversation turned towards us – and everything that might have been. When we had broken things off, I had remained stoic and proud. I played the whole thing down, pretending it hadn’t affected me, only to spend the next several months wallowing and pining for him in private.
But now? Now it all came spilling out like verbal diarrhoea. I told him that, despite us having dated for only a few weeks, I had developed deep feelings for him and could genuinely imagine a future together – something I had rarely envisioned with anyone else. At the same time, I knew that those feelings hadn’t been reciprocated. I had been willing to accept the little he was giving me because I wanted him so badly, but that imbalance would never have worked in the long term.
Getting it all out was cathartic, to say the least. I had thought I’d moved on ages ago, but the relief I felt after finally saying everything aloud was unlike anything else. Perhaps moving on wasn’t about no longer caring. Perhaps it was about finally being able to admit that I had cared without feeling ashamed of it.
The Invitation
Just like that, we started talking about our futures. I told him about my upcoming trips, and he told me about his.
In fact, he was considering a trekking trip to Pico de Aneto in the Spanish Pyrenees and asked whether I wanted to join him. With Aneto rising to 3,404 metres, it is the highest summit in the Pyrenees and climbing it is a proper high-mountain undertaking involving considerable elevation gain, a glacier crossing and the exposed Paso de Mahoma near the summit. Naturally, I said yes.
I probably wouldn’t even have considered it had we not had the conversation beforehand. Now, however, I felt as though I could finally move on and see him as a friend and nothing more. I agreed while conveniently ignoring the fact that I had little to no interest in trekking again after Albania. I genuinely felt out-trekked and wanted a completely different kind of holiday. My knee was also still acting up, and summiting the highest mountain in the Pyrenees wasn’t exactly something most doctors would prescribe in my current condition. But screw it. I had agreed.
Assembling the Team
As the weeks rolled by, Nick managed to convince several of his friends to tag along. Among them were Carrie and Kelly, two of his former colleagues, as well as Harry, a mutual friend. We would also be joined in Spain by Julie, a French woman living in Barcelona.
A few weeks before the trip, Nick arranged for us all to meet. This was partly intended as an icebreaker, but mostly as an opportunity to assess our fitness through a training session. With Malta being Malta – a relatively flat and tragically mountainless island – our grand preparation involved following a two-kilometre trail with around 250 metres of ascent. Twice.
And so, bright and early, I found myself standing at the trailhead, waiting expectantly for the rest of the group. Kelly arrived first, and we had a brief conversation about her dog. Carrie and Nick followed soon afterwards. After a quick hug and some warm introductions, we were on our way. Under the sweltering sun, I gradually began getting to know the women with whom I would soon be climbing a glacier-covered mountain:
- Carrie: A boisterous 48-year-old physics teacher who had appeared on a survival television programme the previous year and now fancied herself something of a local celebrity. Apparently, she could barely leave the house without being recognised. She mentioned the programme with roughly the same frequency that I mention my gap year, which is really saying something. She seemed pretty cool, although perhaps slightly overconfident about the adventure awaiting us. Given that I don’t watch Maltese television, I remained completely unimpressed by the achievement of which she was so enormously proud. Celebrity or not, she would still have to drag herself up the same mountain as the rest of us.
- Kelly: A 46-year-old teacher at Malta’s Alternative Learning Programme and had already assumed the role of the group’s mother and resident bleeding heart. The Alternative Learning Programme provides an alternative educational environment focused partly on practical, vocational, personal and social development. She told me all about her work and the struggles involved in teaching young people affected by social deprivation. She said that the job became worthwhile whenever she managed to “save someone”. I was initially a little sceptical of the phrase, but she could support it with real examples. One former student, for instance, had grown up with a single mother struggling with drug addiction and was now working as an IT technician in Germany. Apparently, she really had changed lives.
The conversation soon became dominated by the fact that Carrie and Kelly were both going through perimenopause. For Carrie, a single mother to a 27-year-old footballer who appeared to be the centre of her universe, the transition didn’t seem to represent any major emotional crisis – apart from the constant hot flushes. For Kelly, however, menopause felt like a door finally closing. She had always wanted children and had tried for years without success. Eventually, she had been forced to make peace with the possibility that it would never happen. Strangely, it was only after relinquishing that dream that she felt as though she had started living again.
Nick remained the quiet and composed man I had come to know during the brief period we dated. Strangely enough, despite how badly I had once fallen for him, I looked at him now and felt nothing beyond a kind of brotherly affection. We caught up on our lives and, most importantly, discussed how on earth this peculiar collection of people was going to summit Pico de Aneto together. The absence of romantic feeling surprised me. For months, I had imagined that seeing him again would reopen everything. Instead, I discovered that whatever hold he once had over me had quietly dissolved. Perhaps saying everything aloud had finally broken the spell.
Four Kilometres of Judgement
As we climbed the 250-metre hill, Kelly became increasingly breathless and began complaining about pain in her knee.
Smoking was at least something she could theoretically address, although attempting to quit while her sister was undergoing treatment for breast cancer would hardly be easy. The knee was a different matter. According to Kelly, her doctor had told her that it was “too far gone” and that she shouldn’t even be walking on it. She added that it frequently became swollen and required regular joint aspirations – something she apparently expected I would be able to perform halfway up the mountain.
She seemed genuinely baffled when I explained that inserting a needle into a joint required proper equipment, suitable clinical indications and sterile technique, none of which would be readily available on the side of Pico Aneto. “But you’re a doctor!” she protested. Apparently, my medical degree was supposed to turn my backpack into a fully equipped orthopaedic treatment room.
Despite all our quirks and flaws, we got along remarkably well. The small talk quickly gave way to deeper, more heartfelt conversations. We completed the route twice, amounting to approximately 500 metres of ascent over four kilometres. That had me panting, partly because of my abysmal cardiovascular fitness and partly because of the heat. Nick, who was ridiculously athletic, treated it like a gentle stroll through the park. Carrie managed perfectly well and kept pace throughout. Kelly struggled and gradually fell behind, though she eventually completed the entire session. Whether she could manage a 3,404-metre mountain involving a glacier crossing was another issue entirely. Still, she had made it, and for now, that was something.
Afterwards, we stopped for breakfast, where Harry was waiting for us. And Harry Harry was this hot Adonis I had been fawning over for years, having repeatedly encountered his profile on dating apps. We had chatted several times, and each conversation had made me want to meet him even more. He wasn’t merely attractive. He had a PhD related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis research and worked as a scientist. He was intelligent, a great conversationalist and apparently quite well-off – which is always a plus.
The last time we had spoken, perhaps two weeks earlier, I had asked him out for a drink. He had turned me down because he had only recently emerged from a two-year relationship. Not ideal. And now I was apparently going to spend five days trekking through the Pyrenees with him. Completely normal circumstances under which to behave calmly and rationally.
The Briefing I ignored
Once we had all sat down, Nick went through the itinerary and explained everything we needed to organise and pack before the trip. I, for one, didn’t pay much attention. This was mostly because I prefer embarking on these adventures without thinking about them too carefully. That is how I have always approached such things – throwing myself into the deep end before fear or common sense has time to intervene.
My first proper trek had been to the Lost City in Colombia. It was one of the toughest things I had ever done, and I had arrived with practically no preparation whatsoever. Had I known beforehand how difficult it would be, I probably would have talked myself out of it. Impulsivity had therefore served me remarkably well – at least when it came to adventure. Whether that strategy would continue working on a glaciated 3,404-metre summit remained to be seen.
So, yeah. I would be spending five days with an ex I had spent the better part of a year pining over, another man I had wanted to date for years, a local celebrity with a healthy dose of main-character energy and a woman whose knee apparently required its own medical support team. Then there was me – underprepared, out of shape, nursing a bad knee and wilfully ignoring most of the itinerary. What the hell had I signed myself up for?