The Last Days on the GR20

     When Mike and I arrived at the end point of the GR20, after seven days of hiking and many strenuous miles on rocky trails,

through narrow rock passes, up spine-sharp ridges and down steep stony paths, we walked through a small village to La Tonnelle, a large restaurant where we could wait for a shuttle to the nearest town. Already sitting on the porch with backpacks set aside and beers in hand were a number of people we recognized – the young man with a topknot; the enormously boring, endlessly chatting man from the dinner table the night before; the young woman hiking with her white-haired father; the young couple and older man hiking together with whom we had leap-frogged for the last several days on the trail. The older man and I would recognize each other with a nod.

      When Mike and I walked up, everyone broke into applause.

      I liked being honored for my accomplishment, but I also wanted to protest: "Oh, but we only did the last half!" Immediately, though, I realized two things. One was that many of these hikers would have known that we joined the trail at Vizzavona, and they still thought we deserved congratulations. The other was that what I had just done was difficult enough, that it had taken strength, courage, and stamina, and that I had displayed all three. I accepted the applause with an exhausted smile. The best tribute came from the man who had exchanged nods of recognition with me when we passed on the trail. He kissed his fingertips and tossed them towards me, with a smile and a nod.

      Mike and I sat at a table and ordered a beer for Mike and an ice cream for me. Mike downed one beer and immediately ordered another. We had a good lunch (not charcuterie; not Corsican cheese), and I had a second ice cream. Our backpacks were on the floor, my boots under the table.

      We had hiked fifty-four miles, an average of eight or nine miles a day. Much of the trail took us steeply up to a razor-edge ridge. I had to pull myself up rock steps too high for my step, then to hop down the same kind of rock step on the other side, leaning hard on my hiking poles to keep the weight off my feet as I landed. We hiked through stunning scenery – pastoral views of grassy hillsides with a sparkling river running through them; passes set so tight in jagged peaks you couldn't imagine how to get down the other side; mountaintops from which I could see the Mediterranean on both sides of the island, sparkling blue in the distance; beech forests and pine forests and large, rushing rivers we had to ford on foot.

 At noon on the last day, a sweaty day, we came to a river with a series of large pools stair-stepping up the mountain. Every hiker who came by took a dip. One young man walked in, turned around, and fell back-first into the water. "Done with style," Mike commented. My style was to swim, so I soon left the bottom pool that everyone else was in and climbed to the next pool up, where only two men sat on the rocks at its edge. There I swam laps (six or seven strokes each). Later at La Tonnelle, they recognized me and called me "la femme dans l'eau."

      There were the people we met, the refuges where we had dinner and the tents we slept in. There were the stunning views, the hard climbs, the mountains and the sea. There was the French language, the Corsican culture, the food (some good, some not). There was rain. There was sun. There were clouds, churning black and shining white. There was the full moon rising big and round, thin and insubstantial over the mountain at Refuge Matalza. There were the rivers I soaked my feet in, wild boars (feral pigs, really) snorting in the ferns,

clusters of red-roofed villages, like beads tossed into the mountains, in the valleys below us. There were wildflower displays to sweeten any day. And there was always the trail, rocky, steep, twisty, drawing us on, day by day,  to its end at La Tonelle.

      It was the GR20 that merited applause.