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WONDERS OF NATURE
Pyrenees. Nature miracle
The three most famous mountain ranges in Europe - the Alps, the Carpathians and the Pyrenees - are extremely different from each other. The longest of them - the Carpathians - is low and almost everywhere overgrown with forest. Its soft picturesqueness does not change even in the gorges of fast Carpathian rivers. They can be called mountain streams only conditionally: they even raft the forest along them. The highest ridge - the Alps - in fact, not even a ridge, but a whole mountainous country of several parallel chains of ridges, cut and cut by numerous glaciers. The highest Alpine peaks rise 2000 meters above the surrounding mountains, but the passes through the ridges, thanks to the tireless work of glaciers, are low and easily accessible, except perhaps for the area of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. The Pyrenees, without a doubt, should be called the most impregnable of all the ridges of Europe. Although their highest point - Aneto Peak - is almost one and a half kilometers lower than Mont Blanc, the average height of the Pyrenees is greater than that of the Alps. The snow-covered giants of the Pyrenees lined up in a slender line are mostly about the same height, and it is not easy to find a gap in their mighty ranks. Therefore, the passes through the Pyrenees are on average twice as high as the Alpine ones.
Until recently, not a single railway crossed the Pyrenees, bypassing them along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. There are places in the Central Pyrenees where for three hundred kilometers there is not a single road through passes lying at an altitude of about two and a half kilometers, and you can get from France to Spain only along the shepherd's paths. The Pyrenees are an ideal mountain system: a long straight chain of mountains, from which, like branches, lateral ridges depart, for the most part strictly opposite each other. The valleys between the transverse ridges are deepened by furious mountain streams to such an extent that they often resemble the American Grand Canyon. In the upper reaches of the valleys there are glacial cirques - rocky amphitheatres, once occupied by glaciers. Ribbons of waterfalls break down from the walls of circuses to the bottom. The largest and most famous circus is located in the upper reaches of the Gave de Pau on the northern, French, slope of the Pyrenees and is called Gavarnie. It is much larger than the Alpine circuses, but became famous, first of all, not for its size, but for its stunning waterfalls. The Gavarni circus is located at the foot of the second highest peak of the Pyrenees - Monte Perdido, reaching 3356 meters and only fifty meters inferior to the peak of Aneto. Perhaps there is no more beautiful mountain in France or Spain, and if the Matterhorn in the Alps is rightly considered the most beautiful of the granite peaks, then Monte Perdido can be safely called the most beautiful limestone peak.
The Gavarni Circus lies at an altitude of 1400 meters and is surrounded on three sides by a 14-kilometer arc of rocks topped with snowfields and glaciers. From the rocky walls of Gavarni, rising 500-600 meters above the bottom of the circus, as many as twelve waterfalls fall down! Most of them already about a hundred meters from the bottom crumble into fine water dust, a cloud hanging over the circus. Only the waters of the highest and most powerful of the "magnificent dozen" reach the ground, overcoming 422 meters in three jumps in free flight. The Gavarni waterfall has long been considered the highest in Europe. Only in recent years has it been established that there are two waterfalls in Norway that exceed it in height. But in combination with the harsh landscape of the glacial cirque and the towering snow pyramid of Monte PerDido, the French waterfall, no doubt, looks much better than its Scandinavian competitors. It was not for nothing that Victor Hugo admired his beauty, dedicating enthusiastic lines to Gavarni. When you stand at the entrance to the Gavarni circus, you get the impression that it is small: ten minutes walk and you will run into a rock. But this is an optical illusion caused by the transparent tew of the mountain air: it will take more than an hour to cross the circus. Having overcome the turbulent stream running from the Gavarni waterfall along the ice bridge, you can approach the glacier descending from the upper part of the circus, and use it to get to the only passage leading from here to the top. This pass, which bears the poetic name Roland's Gap, is distinguished, like all Pyrenean mountain passes, by strong winds. But due to its dimensions (width - 30, height - 80 meters), Roland's Slit turns into a wind tunnel with a "successful" wind direction, through which a real hurricane rushes with a terrible roar, sometimes drowning out thunder. Its strength is such that not only dust flies through the air, but small stones also fly, and a person, if he goes against the wind, has to move on all fours. In the limestone slopes of the southern slope of the Pyrenees, many karst caves have been discovered in recent years, and it turned out that people lived in many of them back in the Stone Age. Archaeologists have discovered here rock paintings, clay figurines and household items of our distant ancestors. In the Pyrenees, in particular, the second deepest cave in the world is located - the karst abyss of Pierre-Saint-Martin, which goes into the bowels of the mountains at 1171 meters, and the Trombe cave system, which occupies the third place, is 911 meters deep. (Deeper than them is only the cave Rezo-Jean-Bernard in the Dolomites, reaching 1602 meters.) In Pierre-Saint-Martin, there is also the second largest underground hall of Verne in the world, 220 long, 180 wide and 150 meters high! A large underground cavity exists only in the Carlsbad Caverns in the United States. Like the streams of other karst regions, the Pyrenean rivers often "disappear", diving into underground holes, and then reappear ten or twenty kilometers below. In conditions of alpine relief, this leads to the fact that karst masterpieces, sometimes fantastic in complexity and picturesqueness, appear in the bowels. For example, one of these rivers, flowing through the cave Sigaler, manages to form underground 52 waterfalls up to eighteen meters high! The largest of the rivers starting in the Pyrenees, the main river of Southern France, the Garonne, also goes underground. Its sources are located on the southern, Spanish slope of the ridge, near the peak of Aneto. After running a few kilometers from the glacier that gave birth to it, the river breaks off a cliff with a waterfall and then dives into the Trou de Tor karst abyss. On the northern slope of the Pyrenees, the Garonne is born again, appearing on the surface in the form of a powerful source, bearing the name of the Eye of Jupiter. Collecting the waters of dozens of high-water tributaries (there is three times more precipitation in the Pyrenees than in Moscow), the river quickly accumulates strength, and already from Toulouse it is a mighty water artery. True, her frantic temper, manifested in unexpected floods and crazy currents, does not allow organizing navigation on her, but for hydropower engineers, the Garonne is a favorite object. For ships, a bypass canal was built along the river to Bordeaux itself, already standing near the mouth of the Garonne. The so-called Southern Canal was also laid to the Mediterranean Sea from Toulouse, and now tugboats and barges sail from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Lion along the entire chain of the Pyrenees. In the foothills of the ridge, on the French side, there is another interesting place. Here, not far from the city of Lourdes, famous for its holy spring, in a castle near the village of Artagnan, in the family of a poor nobleman, Charles de Batu was born in 1613, who became the prototype of the well-known hero of the "Three Musketeers" Dumas. True mountain lovers, choosing the route of a climbing tour in Western Europe, prefer the difficult paths in the Central Pyrenees to the well-trodden, well-travelled, trampled and overpopulated alpine routes. And travelers who are not striving for sports climbing have something to see in these mountains. Deaf, devoid of roads, and often trails, mountain gorges, untouched nature, an abundance of waterfalls, glacial cirques and caves guarantee the tourist a maximum of impressions. The fauna of the Pyrenees is also better preserved than in the Alps. Here you can meet chamois and ibexes, wild boars and bears, as well as wolves that are very rare in European forests. Of our own Russian mountains, the Pyrenees are most like the Caucasus. True, they are shorter in stature, but the beauty of their snow-covered ridges and passes, lakes and waterfalls will not yield to their taller counterpart. The highest Pyrenean peaks are no less difficult to climb than Ushba or Kazbek. And skiers will find here an even wider selection of equipped slopes, which are now built even in Andorra. But whatever reason brings the traveler here: climbing passion, skiing fever, passion for caves or simple curiosity - he will still leave for his homeland with the feeling that he has learned an amazing, harsh and majestic world unlike the rest of Europe. And the snowy peaks of the peaks of the grandiose mountain barrier that separates France and Spain will remain in his memory for a long time. Author: B.Wagner
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