Tour des Arpilles, L’Etivaz
16th June 2008
L’Etivaz is a small village on the on the col des Mosses and famed for it’s cheese. They make the cheese up at the alpages which are high altitude milking parlours, farmers spend the summer up at these alpages and you’ll find them every few kilometres. The cheese is then matured in caves down in the valley for around seven months. There’s a shop in the village that’s open on a Sunday so we didn’t take a sandwich with us, instead we bought some L’Etivaz cheese and some bread to make a picnic.
Our route was to follow the L’Eau Froide stream up the valley climbing up around 1900m. From there we would drop down into the valley of the Torneresse and back to L’Etivaz.
The weather forecast wasn’t too good and as predicted we had a little rain. At 1900m it was actually snowing which is not uncommon for the time of year. There’s a little snow on the ground and more above 2000m on the north facing slopes.
I was using a map printed at home today, this is from the “Swiss Map 25″ product, this is a DVD of the 1:25000 maps from Swiss Topo. Unlike the paper 1:25000 maps this marks hiking tracks, the paper maps show the paths but doesn’t really identify which are the established routes. I’m going to write this up in more detail another time but basically it’s a usable map and a replacement for the 1:25000 or 1:50000 maps.
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