From climbing to merely walking

On Saturday 13 February, some friends and I joined the “Grupo de Empresa” hiking group in a walk around the Sierra. It’s been years since I haven’t gone walking one of these routes. I kind of missed it.

This time we went to La Pedriza, close to Manzanares El Real. The march took almost 6 hours. At moments we found it quite complex and very exhausting. Maicol kept telling us that the difficulty was 3… but 3 what?

I did some research.

First, from the Wiki we learn that what we did was just senderismo. We indeed saw all the signs described in the Wikipedia, thus that path was registered in the Federation.

From the colour of the signs we saw, we can also learn that we did a Pequeño Recorrido  instead of a Gran Recorrido. Following this lead, we can find that there are 37 of those in Madrid, and that the one we did was: “PR-M-1, Circular a La Pedriza” (the M stands for Madrid). Those are supposed to have between 10 and 50km length, thus ours is just within the minimum distance of that margin.

I found another site (in Spanish as well) with different ways to rate these paths:

• Rating the kind of terrain: ours would be type 3 (from 1 to 7).
• Rating the differences in height: it would be no more than 3 or 4 (from 0 to 7).
• All in all, the web proposes one single rating: in which difficulty 3 would be just “moderate” (from 1 to 6).

Next time, we might consider giving less drama to such a heroic achievement.