Jura Traverse #1
29th January 2010
The Jura are a range of mountains separating the Rhine and Rhone rivers along the French-Swiss border. Despite our valley house being just below the Jura in the years we’ve been here I’ve never much explored the Jura instead going to the alps. But last summer I was climbing a lot in the Jura with a friend who lives in Annecy as the Jura is handy for both of us and I thought how great the area was for winter touring. It’s an obvious idea to make a traverse of the whole length of the mountain chain so I set out this week to cross the Jura on skis. Given the rolling terrain it makes sense to use nordic touring gear, longer skinny skis ideal for covering larger distances on rolling terrain.
So I took a train, bus and taxi journey to Giron in the Ain department of France to start a route called the GTJ or the Grande Traversée du Jura français, my plan is to use this for a day or two before hopping over the border into Switzerland and picking up the Traversée du Jura Suisse (TJS) which is a bit wilder and technically harder. I dropped into the tourist office at Giron for a chat and they rather kindly offered me a ride up the mountain to avoid some poorer snow low down which saved me about an hours skiing I’d think, that was handy as the public transport had taken me to nearly lunch time to get to Giron so I was on a fairly tight schedule.
That’s the refuge I used for the first night, extremely basic but it has running hot water and power which is more than we get in the winter in the high alps. The guardian produced some good food and it was comfortable enough, there were only two other people staying so it was pretty quiet.
