‘So, it’ll be like a DofE camping expedition, but without any of my friends?” Lying on his bed in our stone gite in Lescun, a picturesque mountain village beneath a towering glacial cirque, it’s fair to say the 15-year-old isn’t leaping with enthusiasm for our bivouac hike. He and his 13-year-old brother would rather have stayed at the beach, where we spent the first part of our holiday.
My husband and I last hiked with the kids in the French Pyrenees when they were five and three, yet they barely fussed on that trip despite walking for two full days. Back then we had a secret weapon – a donkey called Lazou who carried our packs, and the youngest when he got tired, and proved a great distraction.
On this trip I’m hoping our local guide, Gilles Bergeras, will have a similar effect. He doesn’t speak much English – good French conversation practice for school, I say, to a barrage of eye rolls – but he’s funny and expressive in a way that transcends language.
Driving up to our start point in his van, he throws up his hands and says, “C’est quoi ce bordel!?” (“What’s this chaos!?”) every time we see another car. It’s not remotely busy – we pass six cars at most – but his exasperation with these tiny holiday crowds makes us laugh.
He also gets the measure of the boys quickly, letting the youngest choose our route – he opts for dramatic pointed peaks instead of rolling hills – and giving the eldest more to carry when we divvy up the tents and food supplies for our backpacks, sensing he needs to be slowed down.
We set off west along the GR10, a long-distance trail that runs the length of the French Pyrenees from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, following the painted red and white striped marks through a thick forest full of moss-covered boulders.
The next canicule, or heatwave (increasingly common here due to the climate crisis) won’t hit for a few days, but the air still feels close, even though we’re at altitude – our start point was 1,439m – and we’re glad to be shaded from the sun.
Bivouacking, or overnight camping in the wilderness, is allowed in the Béarn Pyrenees, says Gilles, as long as you camp at least one hour’s hike from parking areas, leave no trace and head off early in the morning. But one of the biggest challenges in high summer is finding water sources, so Gilles suggests we camp near a shepherd’s hut, which has a natural spring where we can fill up our bottles.
When we arrive at the hut, Gilles is greeted warmly by the shepherds, a young couple who graze sheep up here for three months in summer, while we fuss over their friendly sheepdogs. They let us stash our backpacks in their hut while we leave the GR10 to climb a nearby summit.
Hiking without packs is a great relief, as the trail quickly steepens. Our target is the 2,507m (8,225ft) Pic d’Anie, the kind of perfect pyramidal peak a child draws when depicting a mountain. Before long, the grass gives way to loose slates and spiky, angular rock formations, save the odd patch of bright violet thistles and dark purple ancolie (columbine) flowers.
Gilles urges us to tread carefully in parts, where gouffres, or chasms, can run for hundreds of metres below the surface, like crevasses in a glacier. But mostly he walks swiftly, and the boys have been right behind him all day, treating the hike as a race, instead of pacing themselves like their less fit but ultimately wiser parents. They won’t admit it, but I can tell they’re beginning to flag when Gilles suggests we stop for our picnic lunch.
Gilles points out two izards, a local species of goat-antelope, on a precipitous ridge above us, and we watch them pause and then deftly make their way down the slope. By the time we reach the summit, around four hours’ climb from our start point, we’re all quite broken. We bring out the high-energy snacks and Haribo, and enjoy the panoramic views that stretch across the Spanish border and towards the Atlantic coast.
We start our descent with a spring in our step, but we’re glad to eventually reach the hut, quench our thirst in the fast-flowing natural spring and drink in the incredible view.
This area is often called the “Dolomites of the Pyrenees” and it’s easy to see why. To our left is a long, high ridge of vertical rock, above a forest; while to our right the slopes are rounder, with the same mix of grass and rock that fills the U-shaped valley below, and the Pic d’Anie peeking out in the distance.
We set up our tents, while Gilles gets dinner together – a circular bread, which we tear off in greedy chunks, mountain cheese and ham, followed by a beef stew from a tin for the meat eaters, and lentils and couscous for the veggies.
We had met a French couple in the gite the night before who live near the Alps but always come to the Pyrenees to hike in summer with their 10-year-son. “It’s wilder than the Alps with fewer people,” the dad told me when I asked why, and I get that now. Apart from the shepherds and a French couple whose tent we don’t notice until the morning, we have this huge valley to ourselves. And as Gilles uncorks a bottle of local red, and golden light floods our makeshift campsite, even the boys seem awestruck.
The next morning, Gilles sings to wake up the teens, or “les ados anglais” as he’s taken to calling them, and after a quick breakfast of brioche we pack up the tents and get on our way. We take a different route back, this time crossing a series of small rivers and rock gardens that fan out across the hillside, eventually rejoining the GR10 in the forest where our walk began.
Getting tired teenagers to concede that they have enjoyed something is as tricky as getting them to smile in photos, but I took it as a win that mine didn’t just want lots of pictures with Gilles throughout the hike, but actually looked cheery in most of them.
When I asked the eldest how it compared with his Duke of Edinburgh expedition, he said: “Obviously the landscapes were better; my DofE was in East Grinstead … ” But the youngest perhaps best summed up their experience when he said: “At times it felt like homework, but at the end it was like we’d handed it in, and we felt happy and proud.”
An overnight bivouac hike with Gilles Bergeras in the Béarn Pyrenees is €400 for a family of four, rando-bike.fr/randonnée. Tours run year-round, with cabins and equipment (snowshoes/touring skis) used in winter. Sam Haddad writes the newsletter Climate & Board Sports