The first day on the trail! This is already where we find our hiking rhythm: we get up around 6:00, just before sunrise, have breakfast, and hit the trail before 7:30. We meet up with friends, who will join us for part of the GR20, then head to Calenzana for the start.
The first day of hiking on the GR20, when you do it from north to south, the only way to do it in our opinion, starts with a very long climb. It's 1200m of elevation gain, summarized as: "climb to the pass, turn right, climb to the next pass, turn right, go around the cirque to the refuge." It's simple, but it takes a good 6:30 hours to do all that (not counting the lunch break).
It was during this endless climb that we realized our hopes for a hot and dry Corsica were well-founded. Indeed, at that time Corsica was celebrating its third month without rain. What we hadn't anticipated, however, is that a hot and dry Corsica also means very dusty trails, which, in itself, isn't a problem except that our first, and only oversight, hit us hard: we didn't have a lens cloth! Our glasses were almost permanently tinted red with dust. This effect may seem desirable considering there's nearly no cover in the Corsican mountains, but it's rather annoying to have dirty glasses.
Upon our arrival at the refuge, we also came to appreciate two critical new realities of the GR20. First, we did well to plan for 2 days of lunch in our bags, because clearly not all refuges have supplies beyond Corsican sausage. Second, renting a tent is excellent, nothing to assemble and the mattresses are already inflated; however, the distance between the door and the back wall of the tent must be about 1.80m (5'11"), which leaves Pierre-Luc 10cm (4") short of being able to stretch out full length. Despite these little discoveries, the meal at Ortu di Pionu, consisting of a cream of mushroom soup followed by a lentil and tomato dish, was much appreciated and already shows that the quality of food in refuges has improved since our last GR20 adventure 8 years ago.
