Lanjaron Big Climb

Yesterday we moved from El Chorro to a town called Orgiva in the Alpujarras mountains. We moved into a lovely self-catered cottage, Buena Vista, on the outskirts of Orgiva. It was a fantastic base and it was hard to leave our own private little veranda this morning. Just up the road from Orgiva is a town called Lanjaron, this is where we started today’s ride. Sue wasn’t really doing a good job of selling this route to us; explaining that it had a 16km climb and an elevation gain of 800m in one go. What goes up must come down though right? If the climb was that long, the descent has got to be worth a crack surely? Damn right!

The day started off bright and warm, enough so to almost make us leave the waterproofs back at base. The climb started off steep but soon became gentle, once you were in a suitable gear the climb, wasn’t too unpleasant. It was nice winding your way up and being able to watch your progress and seeing the track and town get smaller beneath you. About ¾ of the way up the wind picked up and the sky clouded over. It was time to don that waterproof I almost left behind earlier. The final grind was just that, it needed happy thoughts to drag us those last few K’s to the top. Whilst waiting at the top the clouds got blacker and the wind stronger, a couple of minutes later there was heavy snow coming down. I had to armour up to stop myself freezing, but my fingers started to go. I’ve had the hot-aches a million times before, but this time they were worse than ever, I could have sworn my fingers were read to drop off.

We found shelter under an overhang of rock and warmed ourselves up, jumping on the bikes as soon as we had done to drop down and escape the snow. Even though it hurt like hell to brake, I couldn’t help but smile as the swooped along the hill. Before long we dropped into the open and out of the worst of the snow. We joined with the path over the river and hit the first section of cobbled trail. It was the most perfectly made cobbled trail, zig-zagging round tight switchbacks that stretched out for 8km. The tight zig-zags were incredibly hard at first but by the bottom we were all definitely masters of the switchback.