SnowSlider – Blogging From the mountains by ise

We’ve just bought ourselves some new snowshoes, we both have new pairs of Inook raquettes, the Odyssey for me and the Odalys for Julie basically the mens/womens versions of the same raquette.

Today was the first chance to use them and Col Des Mosses looked the place to go, the snowfall from a few weeks ago needs a refresh so anywhere low isn’t really good and there are trails at Col Des Mosses starting from 1400m and rising to 1750m which I thought would give good snow cover and that turned out right. It was a bit thin in the trees at a couple of points but the beauty of raquettes is that you can leave them on and not damage them like skis.


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We’d walked up to Lac Lioson (Col des Mosses) at the end of November last year and it had been really nice in the snow. Being winter though we’d had to take a shorter route as the days are short and an ascent of Pic Chaussy at 2350m wasn’t practical. Lac Lioson is at 1850m and in the summer the cabane is open serving lunch so after walking up from Les Mosses I took some lunch at their and saved my picnic for the summit later.

Les Mosses is down at 1400m or so so it’s already 400m (1300ft) ascent to Lac Lioson before climbing Pic Chaussy, some people park up at Lioson d’en Bas at around 1600m which lops a handy couple of hundred metres from the ascent but I wanted to climb Pic Chaussy, traverse the ridge and make more of a circuit so I left the car in Les Mosses.

For Google Earth :

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