6500 Steps into Hell (part 2)

Continuing the tale of the amazing March 4th hike along the PR-CV 147 around the Barranco del Infierno a.k.a. "Hell's Ravine". Where did I leave off? Oh yeah! We'd climbed up some of those 6500 ancient steps and spent some time goofing around with the cameras in a daisy-filled field of flowery almond trees! In other words we were pretty much at point 3 on this map:

Now, that would have been a lovely place for lunch... but as you can see we weren't even halfway around the route so decided to continue on until we reached the next spring. As I mentioned in the first half of this tale, once we'd reached the top of the ravine (nice steep climb with lots of steps) I was thinking the hike wasn't nearly as tough as I'd been led to believe, figuring that we'd probably follow a road or path or something up top to get back to the village of Fleix where we'd left the cars... Ummm... NOPE! I hadn't seen that map above (it's a shot from the end of the trek) or I would have known that the route involved climbing in and out of THREE RAVINES! So that's how they made it to 6500 steps... OUCH! And here's a pretty good view of the next two (right before we start climbing down the 2nd).

The Road to Hell is Paved with 6500 steps

I was hesitating between that title and "6500 steps into History", but couldn't resist the word play on the name! What name? El Barranco del Infierno, which pretty much translates as "Hell's Ravine"! :D

Yellow=PRCV147, with Ravine in centre

Although we didn't really do "Hell's Ravine" itself (you have to have the necessary equipment + quite a bit of canyoning experience to do that!), we did the PR-CV 147 which basically does a big loop around the part of the ravine know as the Barranco del Infierno. But when you go hiking there you usually call it by that name instead of its code, or its other nickname La Catedral del Senderista ("the Hiker's Cathedral"). With a nickname like that you just know this is going to be one spectacular hike (it's considered one of the "must do" hikes in the Province of Alicante), and it sure as hell didn't disappoint! Of course this means I took waaaaay too many photos... over 300! Which I knocked down to 210 after deleting fuzzies, repeats etc, and I managed to only put up 170 in my FB album, but try as I might I can't seem to bring it down to a reasonable number to properly illustrate the hike blog... so I guess I'll just have to divide this hike in two posts! It's that or not show you any of the almond and cherry blossoms (and goofing around, lol!) I know you're dying to see... :p

So last Sunday (March 4th) we got together in "petit comité", hopped into two cars, and set out to do this gruelling (distance ~15km -9.32mi- with a total climb of  ~750m -2460ft-) but magnificent hike. We totally lucked out with the weather! Sunny and warm (18ºC ~ 64.4ºF), but not hot, with a light breeze from time to time to help cool us off. In fact, we started off from the town of Fleix in t-shirts! (well, some of us did)

Just outside of Fleix we came across their old "lavadero" (village public laundry area). A beautifully conserved structure:

A few metres past the lavadero... and it was time to start tackling those 6500+ steps!