I am excited to start showing you the experience of hiking to the highest mountain on Madeira which sits 1861 meters above sea level. The mountain is located right in the center of the island. The trail starts from the mountain Pice de Ariero, which is the third-highest mountain on the island. You can see a post of this mountain here where I watched the sunrise above clouds @1812m altitude.
You might think that eh not much altitude gain to the highest mountain then, probably gonna be easy. Oh no no no, you are mistaken here. The trail there and back is 14 kilometers and you have 1000m of altitude change in between these mountains. The trail is well maintained but you have thousands of stairs to climb and that's the hard part.
Having watched the sunrise, it was time to start hitting the trail. It's a quite popular path so there were crowds, at least in the first section of the trail, many are turning back after a couple of kilometers. Right away you are blasted with views of the cliffs and valleys like no other. It was seriously stunning to see.
The weather was pleasant and sunny. We put on some sunscreen because the sun really does start destroying my skin pretty quickly. Im a northern man yeah, UV 10 on Madeira is quite hard for me 😀.
The mountains were sharp and dramatic. Jaw-dropping views everywhere. I think that the first few kilometers of this trail were the most spectacular. All this is an old volcanic landscape that raged millions of years ago and by looking at the rock formations, the origin is pretty apparent to me.
An interesting plant I noticed on the trail. I owe you the answer, I don't know what that might be.
At times, the trail got pretty thin and I could see the long drop on both sides but what a cool sight all around.
Yes, stairs... up and down up and down. There are no flat parts on this trail, you either go up or down and it's exhausting as hell. To take this hike, you really need to be in shape because I can tell you, it is one of the hardest I had done. I consider myself quite a fit person but I lost my breath after 3 kilometers lol 😅. Had to do many short breaks to catch my breath again.
Talking about a thin trail, check this out! The trail is less than a meter wide and on both sides, you have a couple of hundred meters of freefall, that's insane. I am not afraid of heights but my girlfriend is a bit and she was terrified 😂.
There are protection rails but it's not advised to lean on them, as these might give out.
Mostly the trail went along the cliffsides so most of the time you got a long drop on one side.
Here are some more photos of the first half of this trail.
You can see the stairs in the photo below as well. Crazy trail.
On the trail, you can also notice several tunnels that are man-made. The trail goes right through these. Some of them are hundreds of meters long and totally dark so a flashlight is essential when going on this hike.
The best part is knowing that when you got stairs going down like the one in the photo below, you know that you have to walk all of this up again when coming back and these were steep, very steep.
However hard the trail was. You tend to forget it often and get blown away by the sights you see everywhere. The landscape is just so different and spectacular. Here are some more photos.
By that time we were somewhere at the halfway point of the trail.
In the sunshine, the temperature was about 20C and it was really hot, especially when climbing steep stairs. However, when in shade, the real temperature was about 13C due to altitude and combine it with the wind, it got pretty cold.
Whenever you do this hike, lots of water is essential because you will still sweat A LOT.
Soon we were on the other side of the mountain again, on the sunshine side and it got extremely hot again. There are these cool-looking dead trees that seem to be very old. The whole valley is full of these.
There were no stairs in this part of the trail but the path itself was pretty rugged. I reapplied some sunscreen because I started to feel my hand burning. I also positioned my cap in the direction of the sunshine always to hopefully prevent my neck from getting a sunburn. The sunshine is more intense at higher altitudes too.
By that time we had hiked about 5.5 kilometers but it felt MUCH more, the pace is just really slow usually.
This is where I end part one. In the next post, we had to make the final hard push to the top of the Pico Ruivo mountain and saw some crazy views over all of Madeira island. Stay tuned!
Don't forget to participate in my monthly weather guessing game here and you might win 10 HIVE. The game is open until the 17th of February.
