Month: May 2010

Continuing a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010. Some of this information may be outdated!

As described in the last post, there are a whole bunch of good hikes you can do from your base at Corte. Combine this with Corte being the most well connected town in the region in terms of transport and the local hotels and facilities (as well as the fact that Corte is a proper town, interesting in its own right, unlike – for example – Vizzavona) makes it an excellent base for exploring the area.

I had two days before my big hike west over the Corsican watershead, one of which would be spent walking the Restonica valley and seeing lakes Melo and Capitello.

One my first day, however, I decided to break myself in with an “easy” walk. Based on some upside-down logic which escapes me now, for some reason I decided that a hike up to a local landmark, the Arch of Corte (or Arcu di u Scandulaghiu as you’ll sometimes see it). I also decided to do the walk with a full pack to test whether I was up to lugging all my stuff dozens of kilometers over the mountains. For some strange reason I failed to grasp that a vertical kilometer of ascent can hardly be described as an “easy start”.

Continuing a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010. Some of the links are now unfortunately dead – you might try the wayback machine.

Before I had to decide whether I wanted to commit myself to an attempt to hike the western side of the Mare a Mare Nord from Corte to the west coast, I had two days in Corte to see the local sites and hike the local trails. Corte is a great base for walking trips, and based on my research – particularly the experience of these American guys, who walked the whole of the Nord in summer some years ago; these guys from the UK who give good summaries of the hikes they did in Calvi and Corte as part of an organised walking holiday; and corsica.forhikers.com, which contains lots of useful bits of information (albeit with much more geared towards the GR20) – I could happily spend a week there, walking a different route every day and not getting bored. Including short trips on the Michelline train to, for example, Vizzavona, I came up with a good number of tempting places to explore over these two days.