I reckon Dent de Broc is about the closest peak to the house, it’s certainly the closest to the house that I’d not been up before. Although it’s a fairly modest height it’s a slightly daunting proposition as there’s no major path up it and it’s unrelentingly steep. It was already 30′C at the bottom so it promised to be a long, hot climb.

And it didn’t disappoint, the path starts off just heading straight up the hill for the first 45 minutes or so before relenting and dropping into an easier set of switchbacks through the forest before breaking out onto the high meadows. I’d heard voices as I was going up calling out so I wasn’t surprised to meet some people moving some cows between different meadows. There’s no track up here so they’d walked up the same way I did, not just the people but most probably the cows as well.

On reaching the col, a 100m below the summit, you get some views across the local area and you see this familiar “U” shaped feature on a lot of the summits that’s so distinctive of the peaks around here.

For variety I decided to descend the other side of the actual summit to join a path to the town of Broc (above) which sits at the side of Lac Gruyére. I’d stopped to sit on an old log in the shade to eat my lunch and found this frog had beat me to the shady spot. He stuck around long enough for a photo’ before moving on though.

I also ticked the geocache GCP9VD while I was passing, as this requires a significant walk I was only the second person this year to go there and one of only 17 since 2005 when it was placed. Something of a contrast from some of the ones near car parks that get half a dozen visits every weekend. In fact, I’d taken the even harder approach by going up and over the Dent de Broc. This cache gets a terrain rating of 4/5 for the difficulty of the approach, I’m thinking of not doing any that are easier than 3/5 in future.

This was a slightly optimistic route plan, I’d wanted to go and look at a small valley just under the Grand Muveran. I’d planned to walk up the vallon de Nant then cross the col under the Pointe des Savolaires. In the event snow forced me to turn around just short of 2000m, the amount of snow on the ground was becoming a problem and I’d no way of knowing how much snow I’d experience on the other side of the col so I was aware that each metre I was moving up through the snow was a metre I was likely to have to descend. The weather also altered and it started to snow heavily so it wasn’t too pleasant.

Probably though the largest objective risk of the day was my lunch stop, there’s a small wooden building at around 1800m which was open at the front something like a terrace. That seemed a good sheltered place for lunch but as I sat there I started to hear the wood creaking alarmingly and realized the open front was due to the fact the front wall had fallen out. In fact it looked the building had started to fall down so I went to sit somewhere else in case it finished falling down while I was sat there.

It’s a nice valley, classic glacial formations and some high pasture although it’ll be some time before they move cattle up here.

Some signs of the avalanche debris from the winter, there’s some curiously deceptive slopes above here, at a quick glance you’d not see the steepness of the slopes but as I’d already looked at the map I was aware of the angles of the slopes.

As for the plant, ironically it’s a butterbur, not quite the same as the white butterbur on SwissMountainLeader but a butterbur anyway. Why’s that ironic? Because livestrong.com have stolen that butterbur image for their site and refused to remove it when asked, rather than remove the image they’ve suggested I remove my sites from Google so they can’t find them when searching for other peoples images to reuse or that I read their terms and write to them with a load of documentation after which they’ll investigate. Apparently their unauthorized reuse of my image implies I’ve accepted their terms and conditions in their bizarre view of the world. It’s appalling behavior I think and their attitude is odious, they’ve acknowledged it’s my image but they’ve made clear they’ve no intention of removing it unless they’re forced to by legal means. Personally I think instead of paying retainers for lawyers and copyright agents they should not use other peoples work without permission and when they’re caught doing it they should behave with some integrity instead of defining their conduct by what they can get away with or be forced to do.

A great photo of the path, just after getting through the avalanche debris at around 1700m.

I’ve wanted to walk along this ridge for a while, you can see the limestone outcrops from home so it’s an obvious place to go. We’ve been climbing on the south end of the ridge but to be honest I didn’t think it was very good. The gear was poor and it was loose in places so I don’t think I’d bother again although the steeper lines look a lot better.

Leaving the car we walk onto the ridge and the first thing we see a viewpoint with this installed :

This is fascinating, or at least it is if you’re interested in maps. If you click on the photo you’ll get a larger version and be able to read some of the detail. It’s an orientation table showing points of interest that would be visible on a clear day. It’s pretty old and was first placed in 1875 which is quite interesting but what’s really, really interesting is the position written on the lower left. It reads:

46° 49′ 40″ LATITUDE NORD
4° 10′ 10″ LONGITUDE EST DE PARIS

So this looks instantly wrong, I know most of Switzerland lies between 6 and 9.5 degrees of longitude and I’d have guessed we were around 7 degrees just there. The answer of course is related the words “EST DE PARIS” and it’s telling you that this dates from a time when the Greenwich Meridian wasn’t accepted in the French speaking world as being the prime meridian.

The meridian line is a theoretical line running from the north pole to the south pole and a series of such lines divide the earth north-south in 360 segments giving lines of longitude. The lines of latitude are simple of course, the main line can be taken as the equator which is not contentious but not so with longitude. For longitude you need a zero point and this was disputed for some time. Back in 1884 a conference (the International Meridian Conference) established by vote that a line through Greenwich, already used by the British and others, would become the prime meridian. The French abstained from this vote and continued to use the Paris meridian for timekeeping, in the way Greenwich Mean Time is used, until 1911 and on official charts until 1914. The Paris Meridian is the same in concept to the Greenwich one, it’s just zero degrees is in a different place, in fact the difference is 2 degrees, 20 minutes and 14.025 seconds.

So, we ought to be able to check that position quite easily, the latitude should be the same and we just add the 2 degrees, 20 minutes and 14.025 seconds to the longitude and it should be correct. That  gives N46° 49′ 40.0″ E6° 30′ 24.0″ which can be checked on the map :

So I can’t explain that other than to guess that it’s been moved! I think that has to be be the answer, I can’t see how the latitude would have altered and I’m certain the longitude difference for the prime meridian is 2 degrees, 20 minutes and 14.025 seconds.

Those three positions are :

The first thing we reach along the ridge is the Cave Noire which sounds interesting, it’s a little way off the path and it’s a cave unsurprisingly. Of course I’ve got a head-torch in my sack so I crawl in to take a look, Julie decides this is a good time to have a coffee from the flask though. It turns out it’s a (I think) phreatic tube, that’s basically formed by water under pressure below the water table, the passage runs for a hundred metres or so becoming smaller and requiring a crawl in places before entering a small breakdown chamber with a skylight.

Back in the fresh air we continue along the ridge, it’s not a perfect day and there’s a couple of hail and snow showers but it’s basically good and the views down into Switzerland aren’t bad.

Outside a small chalet someone’s been busy making wood sculptures, it’s quite impressive really, either you get it right first time or it’s all gone. And then on the summit of Aiguilles de Baulmes which makes a good spot for lunch.

Moving on, it starts to get a bit airy, the path takes a line a couple of metres from the edge and the ground drops steeply on the other side so it’s difficult in places.

At the bottom there’s some defenses from the war, tank traps in fact. You see these all over the place at strategic points to protect passes and valleys. I think we’ll leave them in place for a while yet, our EU neighbors seem to be in a mess as their economies fail (Greece) and democracy looks shaky in some regions (UK).

That’s the summit cross from the earlier photo, we’re under the ridge now and going to walk back below it before climbing over it to return to the car.

Another wartime defense post and some great looking rock on the ridge.

A great track through the forest, with barely any noticeable climb leads us back onto the ridge and back to the car, we’ve parked just near a mountain chalet so we stop for drink and head home.

Mont Tendre is one of the higher points in the Jura, high enough to still have an amount at the summit today in fact. I’d parked down on the Swiss side which isn’t the most efficient way to the summit, from the French side it’s a climb of no more than 400m or so to get onto the main Jura ridge. Start from the Swiss side and you’re basically down at the Lac Leman level so I was 1100m below the summit before I started which with various undulations turned into about 1500m.

The main climb is up through a forest which was humid and a damp climb before hitting the bracing wind of the ridge at around 1500m and then onto the summit at 1679m. It gets some brutal weather up here, places along the Jura ridge record winters lows down to -40′c and today wasn’t great weather either. A driving wind pushing rain and sleet across he ridge and visibility down to a few metres.

It wasn’t photo weather but I’ve got some GPS files. I did very briefly see a Grand Tetras as well, known as a Wood Grouse but my camera was nowhere near at hand I’m afraid.

I also ticked a couple of geocaches as well :

	5/11/2010	SwissMountainLeader found Mont Tendre (Traditional Cache)	Suisse romande (GE/VD/FR)	Visit Log
	5/11/2010	SwissMountainLeader found Facile 9 (Traditional Cache)	Suisse romande (GE/VD/FR)	Visit Log

I’d got a half day or so to kill before going back to Switzerland so I decided to park up near the Refuge le Repoju and walk up past the Refuge Le Roc de la Pêche towards the Refuge de Peclet-Polset. Once you’ve climbed the short distance to the Roc de la Pêche it’s more or less flat along a high valley to the next refuge.

There was only one other car in the car park, another white Swiss Subaru Forester, I’d passed the guy on the road the other day in fact so I wasn’t surprised to see it there but it’s from Bern just down the road so it’s an amusing coincidence we’re the only ones there. (Ours is the petrol one, the Berne plated one is a diesel for what it’s worth)

Up the valley it’s quite nice, the track’s pretty passable with a couple of snowdrifts in places. Later when I descend there’s a bulldozer moving the snow to allow vehicles up the track. But it’s some of the better weather of the week with patches of blue sky so it’s a pleasant walk up through the valley.

Like the other day I see a Golden Eagle, this time being mobbed by a couple of alpine choughs, it’s common to see smaller birds like this mobbing raptors which always seems quite brave but the smaller birds are trying to protect their young.

Higher up there’s some reasonable looking snow and I regret slightly not having some skis with me but you can’t carry everything with you all the time.

Most common up here though seem to be the marmottes, just out of their winter hibernation I would think and taking advantage of the conditions. They’re a little timid but not unduly bothered by my presence so I’m able to grab a few photographs of them. In fact I got loads of photographs so I picked these few pretty much randomly to post.

I’m in the Vanoise national park right now in France, it’s a wilderness area sandwiched between some of the most developed ski areas in Europe, Val d’Isere, Courcheval, La Plagne etc. It’s actually the first French National Park and covers an area close to the Italian border where it borders the Italian Grand Paradiso National Park forming an area of over 1250 km². Together they’re one of the most important wilderness areas in the world and home to some otherwise rare species.

It’s regarded as a bit early for alpine walking generally now but as I’ve commented before, I think if you pick your routes it can be pretty interesting and you often have the mountains to yourself. I’d planned to make an ascent of a small peak called Petit Mont Blanc, I was optimistic I might work out why it was called that as I don’t get it from the map or looking from the bottom.

I’d parked down near the Refuge le Repoju at around 1700m and took the track up the hillside crossing forest and steep gullies. It’s a good track actually, climbing quickly but not too vertically so I was soon up in the higher open ground where I found this herd of Ibex.

It’s not unusual to see Ibex around here, although they’ve neared extinction in the past they were protected in this area while it was royal hunting estates. The longest horns, an amazing one metre in length, belong to the mature males and evolved for protection again predators like wolves. To get an idea of size, they’re around a metre tall and weigh around 100kg.

As you can see from the photo’s, it’s ideal conditions for the Ibex, who like to be up between 2000m and 4000m, but not exactly clear skies and sunshine. The main problem is snow of course, either underfoot making it difficult to walk or in enough volume to present an avalanche hazard.

And it was the snow that stopped my ascent, it got progressively more difficult to avoid the ever larger snowfields and by around 2400m it was clear the summit wasn’t going to possible so I turned around and came back.

As I descended the weather improved slightly with some broken sun, it wouldn’t have made any difference to the ascent but it did make the descent more pleasant.

Looking down to the refuge near where I’d left the car. The flower is  a liverleaf, once thought to help with liver problems.

Finally, I heard some shrill calls on the wind and looked up to see a pair of golden eagles, for the second time I regretted not bringing a longer lens today. The 85mm I had on my D90 just doesn’t have the reach for this at all. I managed to get a couple of frames but the distance wasn’t ideal, you should be able to see that distinctive white marking under the wings though. Like all of the photo’s, if you click on them you’ll get a bigger version.

I’ve wanted to go up the Dent de Lys for ages but never found the time before. It’s a small peak of 2014m in height in the Bernese Alps just above the ski station of Les Paccots which makes a good place to start an ascent from.

I really couldn’t weigh up conditions from home though, you can’t see the Dent de Lys from here, or from anywhere I’ve been in the last few days, so I couldn’t work out how much snow there was. I can see the nearby peak of Moléson which still seems to have snow at the same height as the Dent de Lys. Even from the car park in Les Paccots you’re tucked down in a fold of hills and I still couldn’t see the peak. So, as I left the car my conservative assessment was there was still ice and snow on the summit ridge so I took ice axe and crampons as a precaution and partly just to add some weight to the rucksack to get a good workout, along with a couple of cameras, lenses and assorted gear I was unlikely to really need.

As I paused for a couple of photo’s (above) just at the top of the ski area I still couldn’t really work the snow conditions out, there’s still a lot lying on some slopes but it’s been really warm and sunny so it’s clearing fast, obviously as the Dent de Lys has a steep approach slope I’m worried about the risk of avalanches and I think if there’s any amount of snow I’m going to have to change my plans a bit. According to the local guidebook from CAS it’s a T4 route, that basically means it’s as hard as it gets without being vertical or in permanent snow and ice.

But so far, below the snow-line it’s nice spring weather and the trail is pleasant climbing up through alpine meadows. The meadows are deserted right now though, the cows haven’t been moved up to their higher grazing yet so the fields and alpages (farms like the one in the above photo) are empty.

Some classic scenery if this area, there’s a familiar shape to the peaks and valleys around here, partly it’s familiar because there’s not many I’ve not climbed or skied on but also because the geology has left some repeating shapes in the landscape.

It’s here (above right or just above) I get the first decent view of the Dent de Lys. Basically there’s not a lot of snow there, it’s amazing really in late April that the weather is so good and that there’s so little snow at 2000m. I would have imagined I’d have been the first to make the summer ascent but crossing a snowfield I see some other footprints and later see a pair moving on the ridge line above me.

It looks like there’s a good safe line up to the col de Lys avoiding the snow which is quite likely to slide off sometime so I head up to the col wondering just where the path to the summit is, it’s just not clear from below. Hopefully there’s some cunning line through the rocks and vertical you can see from here.

From my zoom lens I can see the summit cross but the summit ridge looks interesting, there’s obviously a big drop this side and the map tells me it’s not much different the other side.

The ridge starts fairly reasonably but it’s pretty obvious the difficulty is around the small crag you see on the photo. The plan is to approach that, drop right and then climb up left to the knife edge ridge for the summit.

All along the ridge there’s ring bolts fitted, I assume the local CAS section will come and equip it sometime but today there’s no gear in place so I step carefully across before hitting a couple of sections with fixed chains which are useful.

Mostly I’ve not got any photographs of the awkward bits, I needed both hands to climb so I had to put the camera away for a while.

At the summit I met the couple who I’d seen in front of me just about to start their descent, I think the photo’s catch the atmosphere nicely there.

There’s a geocache at the summit, after the disparaging remarks I made the other day about geocachers this one is a case in point. It’s not been visited for a couple of years by anyone, most of the fanatics with a few thousands geocache finds to their name drive to a couple of hundred metres of the site to find it. As this one takes a T4 summit ridge and a 1000m of climbing it doesn’t get much traffic.

Ironically, I couldn’t find it though. I’ve logged my visit and that I couldn’t find it, I wonder after a couple of winters unvisited if the cache is still there really. It’s supposed to be under some rocks but there was no sign of any loose rocks and I’d be surprised if the snow hadn’t moved them around a bit, this winter was pretty average but the season before we had huge amounts of snow and it’s not unusual for rocks to get pushed 50 or 100m downslope as the snowpack moves around in the winter.

On the other hand, before I left home I was checking my crampons fitted the boots I was using and not reading the webpage for this cache, had I read the webpage I’d have seen the photo of the cache site which might have helped. I am pretty certain the cache wasn’t within 10m of the posted position but looking at the photo I’m wondering if the position was correct, as I read the photo that’s around 20m from the published position. Still, it’s a nice peak and I’ll try it again sometime, I’ll be surprised if anyone else tries in the meantime.

All in all, a great day out. It’s early season and I’m amazed this line is passable in late April so it’s a huge bonus to be able to do it.

It’s easy to see why few people go hiking this time of year above 1500m or so, it can be a bit difficult in places but it is worth it. Probably the most important things to consider are that you have to be prepared for the conditions underfoot which can be difficult with snow and ice presenting a significant danger in places, that you need to be a bit flexible with routes and have a few options to play with on the day and, finally, that it’s winter higher up the mountain and you need to observe usual precautions.

We were following an old road or track that goes parallel and above the Vercorin-Mayoux road, the plaque above commemorates the road being built in 1921 in fact, then up through the forest to join another track to come back along the mountain.

At some point our track vanished under snow, the terrain was awkward as the snow lying on the ground can cover boulders and if you step heavily you can go through the snow to the boulders below and potentially hurt yourself. You also keep going in to your knees in soft snow which is just annoying. So we decided to cut a line up through the forest which was extremely hard work, the terrain kept pulling us away from our waypoint so the 150m became more like 250m. You can see above left the sort of ground it was.

But after we’d hit the track as planned we got to a clearing in the forest and had a picnic enjoying the sun and spectacular views out over the valley.

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!

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.