“I can’t climb up there. This rock is all crumbly.” It was sunset. We were five meters above a frozen lake bed, in sight of our hut, yet a meter-wide bergschrund from safety. Without stable rock to anchor a rope, there was no way to climb across the just-too-far-to-jump gap between the snow we skied down on our left, the crumbly cliff to our right, and the ice below. 

For months, we had planned a weeklong ski touring route through a little-skied range in northern Spain. Rain melted our original plans away, and we pivoted to the Pyrenees, the epic range bleeding across the borders of Spain, Andorra and France. A friend of a friend clued us into a four-book series of ski touring guidebooks. The catch: they were only available in Spain, and only in Spanish. 

Thus, I found myself in a mountaineering store in Madrid, hustling high school Spanish for maps and books. “Tiene libros uno, dos, y cuatro… pero necesito libro tres también… lo tiene, señor?” Our three-month planning process was shortened to three hours, and didn’t include guidebook three. Although we couldn’t read the Spanish, we could read the universal language of maps and aerial photos, conveniently marked with thick blue ski descent lines.

With guidebooks in pack and a 5-day ski route in blue, we ditched our Eurovan at the end of a winding mountain valley road. After a 5,000-foot climb, we kicked our last wind-packed boot steps up the pass between Spain and France at golden hour. The view across the Pyrenees left us in delirious giggles. We were just 2,000 feet of corn skiing from our hut, at least according to the guidebook’s blue line. 

It was all hoots and hollers until the final few vertical feet, where—instead of a quick skate across a lake—we met an impassable bergschrund. We bailed on the bergschrund, bootpacked back up to the rest of our group, and saw that the crack unfortunately stretched all along the shoreline. 

But hope remained for a roof and dinner. We spotted a thin path of avalanche debris running onto the lake. That hard-snow debris looked like a bridge over the bergschrund. We could traverse to it between the cliffs above and the crack below.

As sunglasses became too dark and the first planets shone in the dusky sky, Sam and Adrian skied ahead to try it. Adrian acted as a body anchor while Sam, on rope, tested the bridge to the lake. We all put on harnesses, just in case someone required a crevasse rescue. One by one, we straightlined the debris crossing. Merry with relief, we skated across the lake under a starry sky.

That wasn’t the last of our route-finding, literally or figuratively. We kept skiing into places where the blue line and the real world didn’t match. We navigated our way through language barriers and got linguistically lost a few times, like when the “bird” served at a full-service hut for dinner turned out to be a gamey rabbit. We crossed international boundary lines that felt abstract and avoided risk tolerance boundaries grounded in reality. We traveled the unreliability of that guidebook blue line and found the reliability of adventure—which is what we were there for anyway.