Two beds decide whether you can reserve a hut to hut walking week in the Pyrenees

This one does not exist without an introduction. The ground is public and the waymarks are free, but the nine nights hold together only because two people who take no public reservations agreed to keep beds for us. You can reserve a hut to hut walking week in the Pyrenees here, or walk the same ridge in a different order on your own.

• Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
• No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
• A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.

The two beds that are not for sale

This catalog sorts every week by one number: how much of it you could have arranged without us. This one lands on the last step. It does not exist without an introduction. The walking itself needs nobody. The route is waymarked, the passes have been crossed by shepherds and smugglers for centuries, and anyone with boots and a spring afternoon on the reservation pages can put nine days together on that ground. What you cannot assemble from a laptop is this chain: nine nights in one direction, each stage ending where the next begins, held together by two nights in the middle. One is a working farm in a side valley that keeps four walker beds and answers people its owner already knows. The other is a set of places a warden holds back each season for parties he has agreed to take. Neither sits on any reservation page. Both were arranged by telephone, by a person who has sat in both kitchens. That is what you are paying for, and we would rather put it in the first paragraph than let you find it later. You never pay this office. The households that own the beds bill you; our commission comes from them, afterwards, out of their side of it.

Nine days of ground

Nine days, eight stages of walking and one day without a rucksack. About 118 kilometers and something close to 8,400 meters of climbing, which is the part people underestimate; the distances are modest and the ascent is not. Days run five to eight hours of moving, plus stops. The line starts above Cauterets on granite, crosses a 2,528 meter pass on the third morning with old snow in the gully until mid July, and drops into the valley below the shrinking glacier that hangs on the east side of the 3,298 meter peak above it. Day four is the long one: 1,350 meters of climb to a house at 2,587 meters under a notch in the ridge, forty meters wide and a hundred high, cut clean through limestone at 2,807 meters. You sleep there twice. The free day goes up to the notch and back, or nowhere at all. After that the rock changes: limestone shelves and grass to a 2,534 meter pass under a wall that runs unbroken for two kilometers, then down into the Aure valley, then granite again for two days through the lake basin under the Neouvielle, over a pass at 2,498 meters, and down to Bareges. Nothing on the walk is roped. Two short sections have chains bolted into rock, and on both you will want your hands.

Storms that arrive at two in the afternoon

Weather here comes off the Atlantic and turns up on a schedule. In July and August the mornings are usually clear, cumulus starts stacking over the ridge around eleven, and by two or three in the afternoon there is thunder somewhere in the range. That is why breakfast at the high houses is at six and why the wardens have people out of the door by seven. Being over the pass before one o'clock is the whole discipline of the week. Above 2,500 meters the north facing gullies keep old snow into early July, hard at dawn and soft by noon, which is why the office reserves this walk between the fifth of July and the twelfth of September. Wardens leave in the third week of September and the buildings become unstaffed shelters with no food and no blankets. Nobody can promise you a clear ridge. Two of the nine days have a lower alternative if the pass is out; day five has none, and if the warden says no that morning you go back down the way you climbed and the week loses a stage. That happens perhaps one year in five, and we would rather you read it here than hear it at half past six in the rain.

Nights at 2,500 meters

Eight beds, nine nights, and two of them have a hot shower. A night in a staffed mountain house is a dormitory: mattresses laid side by side on a wooden platform, eight to forty people in a room, a folded blanket and a pillow provided, and a sheet liner you bring yourself and cannot borrow. Boots come off at the door and live on a rack; the house lends you clogs. Dinner is one sitting at half past six or seven, soup first, then a pot of something with lentils or duck, then cheese, then bed. Breakfast is at six, bread and jam and coffee out of a bowl. Lights go off around ten. Three of the eight have no telephone signal at all, and one has no running water in the evening because the pipe from the spring freezes. Two have dry toilets. Power is solar, so nobody charges anything. Half board runs between 58 and 66 euros a person a night at this season's prices, and that sits inside your figure. If you have never slept ten centimetres from a stranger who snores, that is what the week is, and earplugs are not a joke.

What the nine days ask of your legs, and what $3,320 buys

This suits two people who already walk. Six to eight hours a day, back to back, with 1,000 to 1,350 meters of climbing and eight kilos on your back, over rock, grass and old snow. If you have done a Lakeland week or a fortnight in the Alps and still enjoyed the fourth day, you will be fine. It does not suit anyone who needs a door that closes, a bathroom of their own, or a bag waiting in the room each evening; luggage moves twice in nine days, at the two valley crossings, and the rest you carry. It is not a first mountain week, and the office will say so rather than take the reservation. Two of the eight houses do not accept under fourteens. From $3,320 per person: nine nights half board, the two luggage moves, road transfer from the valley station at the start and from the finish, and a qualified mountain leader from the valley on days four and five. Not included: your own flights, everything you eat between breakfast and dinner, drinks, and anything bought below the trailhead. If you would sooner reserve the eight houses yourself, do that, and ask us for the order and the walking times. We will send them without a bill.