An 18-year-old young man, Mäel Le Lagadec, from the French department of Tarn-et-Garonne, has posted a video on the Internet in which he details the ascent to Aneto to place a cross, which he carved himself, after the disappearance of the original piece, placed at the summit in 1951 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (CEC). The news was reported by the French newspaper La Dépêche which details that the young man made the cross from walnut wood and inscribed his initials on it.
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Le Lagadec, accompanied by a friend, climbed Aneto, at 3,404 meters, carrying the cross, weighing about 35 kilos, last Saturday. They parked at Llanos del Hospital, as seen in the video posted on his Instagram account, and started the midnight ascent. They reached the summit at 14:40, according to La Dépêche. The mayor of Benasque, Manuel Mora, says that other hikers crossed paths with Mäel and his companion along the way.
Mäel recounts that once past the Mahoma pass and already at the summit, he used his ice axe to make a sort of hole in the snow and place the cross. He says he will return later to secure it better so that it withstands the onslaughts of time.
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Residents of the Benasque valley could not believe the news because of how surreal it was. The young Mäel, according to what he told La Dépêche, did not start practicing mountaineering until last autumn.
The disappearance of the original cross last April caused astonishment in Benasque. The Civil Guard considers the main hypothesis that one or more people sawed the aluminum piece with a radial saw, weighing more than 90 kilos and measuring four meters long by two wide. Then, they would have thrown it down the mountain, whole or broken into several parts. Everything suggests that this action was carried out by people with experience in the mountains.
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