Bill Walker (“Skywalker”, he’s tall) has written books about the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, (both of which he through-walked), and the Camino. He noted that the people who laid out the Appalachian Trail never went around a mountain, they always took the trail right to the top and back down.
The Camino del Norte is in active development. Originally it had a lot of road walking. They are redesigning it to avoid roads as much as possible. In principle this is a good thing but the result is often that a road walk of three miles is replaced by a walk of seven miles through the mountains with a vertical rise of 300 meters. This is not an exaggeration, we have walked those. The walks are beautiful but all up and down. You never encounter switchbacks. Just straight up then straight down.
And the mud. Yes the mud. Did we mention that it rains a lot here? It seems that rain creates muddy sections on trails that are continually going up and down. Who knew?
We are of two minds about this. The forest trails are undeniably beautiful but we recently avoided one and took the road and were happy we did. Then, close to town (Gernika) , we took the new Camino path avoiding one mile of lightly traveled road (say a car every 4-5 minutes) and took the path and found mud and more mud. And it was slow, and steep … and muddy.
Of course, I like the beauty of your camino, but the actual work of it is probably well outside my capability. Up and down is hard enough, but slogging it through mud sounds like torture!
Hi Vicki, so good to see you on the blog. We’re still getting quite a bit of up and down but haven’t had mud in many days. We don’t miss it! Wynette