2020-10-04 45 4

Location

In an enclosed meadow in La Ricamarie.

Participants

Baarde

Expedition

I had managed to avoid the No trespassing consolation prize until now but here my success streak comes to an end.

Looking to satellite photographies of the geohash, I noticed that the meadow containing the coordinates was separated from the path by a hedgerow. And hedgerows often contain fences. I certainly wasn't going to devote half the afternoon to that expedition just to be stopped by a fence and go back home. Instead I decided I would devote the whole afternoon to that expedition and do a little bit of hiking while I was there. It's not like there was a storm^[1].

I arrived in La Ricamarie at 12:45 and quickly walked to the geohash. As I had feared, there were a few obstacles:

There was a hedgerow: That was expected.
The hedgerow was 2 to 3 meters above the path: Not a problem.
There was indeed a barbed wire fence: Well, maybe I could find some way to…
There were cows grazing on the geohash: OK, I don't want to disturb farm animals…
And a bull!!

…

So I began my hike by walking up a ridge and descending to a reservoir in a gorge on the other side of the mountain. Shortly before I arrived to the lake, despite my weather app's optimistic forecast, it started to rain. I donned my rain jacket and pursued my route, hoping that the rain would stop soon, which it didn't. As I walked along the reservoir, the path led me through soaked ferns to a small ford and a muddy track that climbed to the other side of the gorge. I was now fairly wet. Then the path went down again and crossed the river over a bridge before turning left and ascending gradually to the mountain ridge that led back to Ricamarie. The rain finally stopped, as the clouds were blown away by the wind, and an hour later I was back to my starting point, having walked 15.5 km.

The cows and the bull were gone by now. But the barbed wire fence was still there. So I headed back towards the train station and started looking to the timetable on my phone. I realized I had two options:

Waiting two hours in La Ricamarie.
Walking six kilometers to Saint-Etienne main railway station.

So here's some advise if you ever decide to walk from La Ricamarie to Saint-Etienne downtown: when choosing between going through a place named Bellevue (beautiful view) or through a place named Le Clapier (the hutch), choose the former.