Tag Archives: Iñaki Vigor

The Basques love their bordermarkers

More and more I encounter names of Basques, keen on finding and photographing their share of the bordermarkers of the Pyrenees. And that’s the range from bm001 to bm272 and that amounts to 40% of all esfr-bordermarkers!
Carlos Sanz and Iñaki Vigor have even described a 206km-trail along those range in their “Travesía de los Mugarris”. And Javier Martínez Ruiz from Irún has visited the 1-235 range for many years and wrote a large article on them (see for both publications my literature-page). And there are several photo-sites, focussing on the Basque bordermarkers: see my links-page.

But other searchers have hardly left their trace on the internet, often you can’t even find an email adress to ask a question. Apparently they have stored their pictures and information in paper albums, understandable in the pre-internet era but now perhaps gathering dust forever. Sharing is fun & enrichment and so easy on the internet.
I’d love to get into contact with for example: Carlos Bardeci from Bilbao and Jesús Murueta, also from Bilbao but currently living in Toronto and known as “El canadiense”. Both names mentioned by Sanz & Vigor as being sources for their book, having found nearly all the Basque bordermarkers.

A shorter route between bm271 and 272?

On 20120829 I had to make a large detour to get from bm271 to 272. A shorter descent seemed impossible because of the steepness of the rock-hillside underneath bm271. But I was surprised to read that Iñaki Vigor and Carlos Sanz (see literature) did use a more direct (cairns-waymarked) trail. They also thought it was far too steep. But they found at the saddle between the two hilltops (between bm271 and the former bm271bis) a cairns-trail which took  them without much problems to down below.
Also Javier et María-Jesús Sancho-Esnaola (see this previous post) took a short-cut but their starting point was the saddle east of bm297bis. They talk about following a cairns-trail, descending to the right down a gully (including some rock-scrambling), the route not always being obvious.

In both cases, they must have descended SW. Straight S is – according to the elevation lines – really too steep. Let’s draw it on this Google Earth-capture:

Conclusion: I have to return and check.