SnowSlider – Blogging From the mountains by ise

Ste-Croix is in the canton of Vaud but in the Jura range mountains on the Swiss-French border, Ste-Croix is just a few km from the French border. Despite it being local to the valley house I’ve never been over there in the winter, in fact I’ve only really been to the Jura to enjoy the sport climbing on the crags there. This was a fairly random trip on snowshoes, I’d looked at the map and had a couple of ideas for routes but we were flexible.

The best idea seemed to be to just park somewhere and head out, I only really wanted to get an idea of the terrain in the area so I’d no particular objective in mind. In the end I decided to head for the top of Mont Cochet which is a pretty small peak near the town, there’s some ski lifts below there which weren’t running today. Snow was good though, just not really enough for them to piste I think but perfect for snow shoeing.

On the top of Mont Cochet there were a handful of people including a guy on skis with a couple of lads on snowboards they’d presumably carried up. Really cover wasn’t ideal for it particularly on the descent they’d picked as I think the wind had shifted a lot of the snow, it could have improved lower down though. What was funny what the skier set off seemingly determined to call out every rock he encountered, so he set off shouting caillou” every few seconds, you can only assume it was a long descent!

On of the great things about snowshoeing, and living somewhere with a bit of snow, is you can quickly find yourself away from the beaten track. These pictures are just from a short tour around the forest behind the chalet. There’s no marked trails so you can wander through the forest as you want.

Apparently the abundance of rowan berries we seem to have this year is a good omen for a snowy and cold winter. So far it’s more in line with long range forecasts though, it’s not bad but we’ve seen temperatures ranging from -20′c to +4′c or higher.

The snow’s still pretty good although down here it’s below 2000m and it’s got a bit saturated by rain and melting, without the snowshoes it would be pretty heavy going.

Apart from some rock climbing on Saturday this is the first time Julie and I have managed to get out together since back in June and probably only about the third time this summer, it’s the first time I’ve been out for myself since July as well. But, it’s a great time, the autumn colours are coming out and the mountain’s empty, the cows have been moved down and a lot of the migratory birds are leaving and tourists are long gone.

There’s a nice path up from the nearby village of Chandolin, it rises about 500m but the angle’s perfect and we’re comfortably up at the Tsape restaurant in an hour for a local specialty, an “Assiette Valaisanne” which is a selection of dried and smoked local meats with local cheese.

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I’ve just got back from a couple of weeks on Corsica leading a group on the GR 20. The GR20 is one of the most famous treks in the world and reckoned to be fairly hard. There’s a fair amount of scrambling involved, some travel over snow and fixed equipment like chains and ladders etc. so it’s fair to say it’s pretty challenging. The term “rugged beauty” might have been invented for Corsica though, it’s spectacular and I really enjoyed my first trip to the island. There’s a slightly different flavour to the refuges to the normal alpine huts and I’d been particularly looking forward to staying at the bergeries which are where farmers live and tend their flocks for part of the year following the old practice of transhumance, they didn’t disappoint and I loved trying the local cheese, and the charcuterie which is famed for being produced from semi-wild pigs who roam around the island foraging and searching out their favourite food of chestnuts.



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