Snowy Mountain Hike in Cercedilla

As if we didn’t get our fill of the outdoors during our visit to the Retiro yesterday, today we decided to go on a hike in the Sierra de Guadarrama within the Cuenca Alta del Manzares regional park. This is actually the same mountain range that we had to drive over to get to Segovia last weekend. (Wow, I can’t believe it was only last weekend that we went…) Though our hike was cut short due to a lot of snow on the ground, we still ended up with a challenging trek of about 6 miles.

For me, the trip started at 6:45 this morning when I had to get up. It was very difficult to get up that early on a weekend, but we knew it would be worth it and in order to go on the hike we had to catch the 8:15 train to Cercedilla, a town located about in the Guadarrama Mountains about 57 kilometers outside of the city of Madrid. Surprisingly, it was not hard at all to get there. The fourteen of us gathered at the Chamartín Metro Station and from there we just took a Cercanías train, Madrid’s commuter rail equivalent to NJ Transit or the MARC; it only cost us €10,80 and lasted around an hour.

Even though we did not see much of it until we came back down the mountain, Cercedilla was a very cute town. Almost everyone that we saw and that got off the train station had hiking gear though, including some of the elementary school children that had a field trip there, so we think the area is a very common escape for madrileños to get some fresh air away from the city life. Most of them were much better dressed for the hike than we were… though we made sure to dress in layers, bring lots of water, and wear hats and gloves, most of us didn’t have any boots to wear. This gave us the opportunity to learn a new Spanish word: zapatilla, or tennis shoes. Though the other people we saw on the hike were nice and we had some nice conversations with them, they all made sure to point how we should be wearing much more than zaptillas while hiking. The looks we got from the ladies wearing the snow shoes were the funniest, but I definitely think we were better dressed than some of the joggers we saw running around in shorts and t-shirts.

Our makeshift map…

Anyway, because the train let us off in part of the town, we had to first make our way to the trail head. As a warm-up, we ended up missing the main path and taking a scenic walk around a residential area to the scenic alternative starting point. 😉 The beginning was not very well-marked, but we eventually got to the starting point thanks to a nice old man who helped us navigate around a herd of bulls with very pointy horns that left quite a few landmines for us to watch out for. After eventually making it to the start of the trail he pointed out to us, we were confronted with a fork… though our friend Max had a map, that map was hand-drawn from the Internet and so did not include much details; plus the trail the man pointed out to us did not jive with the trail we were supposed to be headed for. Thankfully, two other hikers helped pointed the main path out to us, explained the difficult-to-see red circle trail markers, and were even kind enough to give us a map! Needless to say, we were very impressed with the kindness and happiness of everyone we met on the trail today. It turns out that most outdoorsy people are nice no matter what country you’re in.

The trail started off pretty easily at first. Even though we began to sweat going up some of the early hill and had to take off our sweatshirts, the weather was still pretty warm (about 45F/7C) and the hike wasn’t too intense. As we continued on, it got colder and we began to see more snow. We were obviously expecting some snow since it was in the mountains, but we ended up very surprised by how much there was: near the top it was up past our ankles. The trail was almost completely covered in at least 6 inches of snow (15 cm)! We had planned to do a 10.34 mile loop that went to the top of a valley near the border of the Comunidad de Madrid and Castilla y León, but because of the snow, the same men who helped us originally find the trail and gave us a map encouraged us not to. We could’ve continued along a different path, but we decided to go back down the mountain the same way we came.

Even though we only made it up to the first pista, we still really enjoyed our time on the mountain. We had a good group of people with us, and even though they were all at different experience levels and hiking in any group as large as fourteen can be tough, we all definitely had fun and were sufficiently challenged. We want to come back and try to actually make it to the top of the mountain in March or April when there’s significantly less snow! After we made the slow trek down the mountain–which is sometimes harder than going up it–we had some time to kill before the next train back to Madrid, so naturally we needed to replace the carbs we had lost with some tapas, Mahou, and tinto de verano from a local bar we found near the center of the town.

It was a long day of some tough hiking, and I think my soaked feet have only started to thaw right now. We didn’t get back from our almost 12 hour day until around 5:30pm, but we had a lot of fun and we’re very glad we went. I hope we are able to go on another hike very soon, just maybe one not as cold and snow-filled!