 |
| Mount Teide - view from Parador, 10 min drive from the starting spot |
The Plan
Obviously climbing Pico del Teide is almost a must-do if you are on the island. While technical not too challenging, it remains a steep hike exposed to different weather conditions, heat, cold, wind, snow, ... Reading through some - mostly hiking - descriptions, the idea was born to try to reach the summit with as much running as possible and traverse via a different route.Actually, I also found a video of a guy running on the Teide - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg5v2MjD0Us. Quite motivating though he is definitely in a different league - no way for me to just copy that.
Eventually my planned Route looks like this:
As you can see this is quite a demanding route. Some of the constraints driving the selection are:
- only one day away from the family
- minimal logistic effort
- as much of a roundtrip as possible
I choose public transport as a means to get close to the mountain. Unfortunately the bus(342) goes only ones a day and to rather unpractical times: Arrives at 11:00am in the morning and leaves at 15:45pm., assuming you are staying in the south west of the Island. This leaves you with a rather little time window. Hence the plan to not use this bus on the way back, but run&hike further down to a village - Tejina de Guía -, where another, more frequently operated bus can be reached.
On the long way down to from the summit to the village, water supply could easily become an issue. Hence I was quite happy as I spotted some drinking water spots in the Open Street Map, close to my selected route.I verified via email with the author of those map entities,that those should be indeed functional at the time I would be on my way.
Overall the plan seemed to be quite ambitious for me and I looked at a couple of exit strategies - which turned out to be a wise decision.
The Reality
We arrived at Tenerife in a rather poor medical condition. My daughter had fetched a cold with strong coughing and inflamed eyes, while I had a sore throat and light cold thanks to the a/c in meeting rooms and planes. Turned out that neither of us recovered completely during the vacations. The last too day before the summit attempt I played it quite easy and felt rather good so that I decided to give it a try. But already during the 2 hours bus drive, strong&painful coughing was back. Not good, but let's see.
 |
| Info board at entrada montaña blanca |
