Travel deep: hiking the Mercantour

There are many different ways of travelling. In the spring and summer, it’s good to travel far, and travel fast; but in the autumn, with months of adventures in the legs, it’s time to travel deep. In the high backcountry behind Nice lies the Mercantour National Park; many of our favourite roads pass through it, like the Col de Turini and Col de la Bonette, both of which will feature in the final stages of the 2024 Tour de France. But because of the terrain and the park’s regulations – which forbid any development or construction, any off-road cycling, any hunting, mushroom picking and even dogs! – there are vast areas that are inaccessible even to mountain bikes.

These are trails and passes you can explore only by foot. We set off for a late-season hike in the last of the year’s sunshine, to deepen our knowledge of the spaces between the roads. The aim was to do a tour of Mont Bégo, a 2,872-metre-tall mountain in the heart of the park whose flanks are covered with bronze-age rock carvings. Why they are there, nobody knows, but these hidden valleys have been regarded as special – sacred even – for thousands of years. Away from the trailhead, we were quickly swallowed by silence and light.

No cars or motorbikes buzzing up and down the roads, only fresh, still air and low-angled sun. In peak season there is a good network of high-mountain refuges that welcome travellers, but in this shoulder season, after the summer and before the snow, only a single one was open, in the ‘Valley of Wonders’ itself.

But this was enough to help us complete our loop, and we stayed there two nights, separated by one night in a bivacco. This basic, unattended cabin just over the border in Italy provided bunks, blankets and a roof; everything else we had to carry in with us – and, of course, carry out again.

Life for these few days was gloriously simple: walk, eat, drink, sleep, and walk again, into forbidding cirques seemingly without an exit and up scree slopes to forgotten passes; or down, through larch forests ablaze with colour next to rushing, babbling streams. A path, however small or indistinct, is a friendly thing.

It is a sign someone has been here before – and gives hope that, somewhere near its end, is a warm welcome, a cold beer and a place to lay down your pack. We walked 70 kilometres over those three-and-a-half days – around the same distance as three hours riding a bike. We moved slower, thought slower, experienced slower and saw so much more.

You could walk these trails for years without ever quite seeing or feeling the same thing twice. Perhaps, I think, even a single valley might be enough to explore, through rain, sun and snow, watching the shadows change and the trees grow and the years pass.

In the short time since we descended back to civilisation, the season has turned and big storms have again ravaged the valleys behind Nice. It’s a reminder of how hard life can be in these mountains and that they are not always as benevolent, which makes the memory of time there in the sun all the sweeter.

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