DESCENDING TO SOSPEL
ABOVE BAISSE CAVALINE PASS – BELOW SAN SIMEON
VIA ALPINA DAY 72 – TUESDAY 1 SEPTEMBER 2026
DISTANCE HIKED: 36.50 km
ELEVATION GAIN: 1,336 m
TOTAL DISTANCE HIKED: 1,910.93 km
TOTAL ELEVATION GAIN: 98, 299m
Sheepdogs somewhere below where we camped were kept busy through the night. We could hear their distant barking sporadically throughout the night.
We woke early and were on our way before 6am, it was still dark. From our campsite, we followed a ridgeline with numerous mountain passes, mostly descending. What a joy this morning was. A beautiful sunrise, a view of the ocean, and the moon still hanging in the sky. It made me want to run to the finish!
It was a perfect morning, except for the wasps buzzing around our heads at the passes, followed by flies whenever we were in the sun.
It would appear that the Italian border was much closer to the ridge we followed than we realised. There were quite a few bunkers, a fort and the remains of cannons along the trail. I saw one border post, but it had no country initials or date on it.
Wild lavender, long past flowering but still smelling wonderful, lined the trail in places, along with sage and a few other aromatic plants. As we descended further, the pine forest gave off that wonderful aroma of baked apple pie—especially later in the day as it warmed up.
Apart from a shepherdess with her sheepdog rounding up some sheep, and later a trail runner, we didn’t see another person until we arrived in Sospel, later in the day.
It was a 2,200m descent to Sospel from where we had camped the previous night, and it felt like it took forever. It was getting warmer the closer we got. It reminded me of hoe it felt in the Slovenian heatwave back in June when we started.
We had run out of water on the descent, and the town just didn’t seem to get any closer. Rather than focus on how much longer we had to go, I distracted myself by replaying the scenery we had passed yesterday in my mind—the transition in geology, the amazing clarity of the water in the hundreds of creeks, and the numerous emerald lakes. This side of the mountains could not have been more different.
We finally made it to town just after 2pm. Sospel is dissected by a river that didn’t have much water in it, and the town looked very Italian. It even had town gates spanning the river.
We bought cold drinks from the supermarket and sat in the shade in the car park, recovering. Sandwiches and sweets from the boulangerie followed, and slowly we began to feel human again.
The rest of the day was not so pleasant. We needed to climb back out of the river valley. It was hot, the trail was nice to start and then slowly became awful, and then it got worse—overgrown and neglected, and hard to follow in sections. An occasional trail marker reassured us that we were still on the trail.
Late in the day, we found a flat spot in the forest and called it a day. We spotted our first mosquito in over two months on the trail. Hammer dispensed with it quickly, but not before it had a feed from me.
Exhausted, we fell asleep to the sounds of the forest—snaps and cracks in the darkness—lit by the pale light of the waning moon.
