SnowSlider - Blogging From the mountains by ise

Chalet du Soldat is located near the Jaunpass which is a favourite local area of mine. It’s basically pre-alpes and not far from Gstaad and close by La Berra where we were at the weekend. Today I was on my own and I was interested to go and see the Chalet du Soldat. The chalet used to be called the chalet du Régiment until 2007 when they changed the name to Chalet du Soldat.

The original chalet was built in 1945 by the “Régiment d’Infanterie 7″, a unit of the Swiss Army, and originally called “Chalet du Soldat de Fribourg” before changing to “chalet du Régiment” in 1952. There’s an interesting history in French on the internet, L’histoire du Chalet du Soldat.

The chalet is open weekends in the winter with accommodation and in the summer, right now it’s closed until June 1st so I’m expecting it to be nice and quiet. My plan is to walk up there and have a picnic lunch outside the chalet.


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The weather looked a bit variable as we left the house and it looked like either sunshine or storms were possible. We’d left mid-morning and intended to take a fairly short route. Julie also had some new boots to try, a pair of Scarpa Charmoz GTX’s which are a lightweight alpine boot for use in mixed terrain. These stiffer boots are made for the alpine environments we hike in.

We’d roughly planned to leave Jaunpass for the Hundsrügg (2047m) but by the time we reached Oberenegg at 1930m there was some stormy weather heading from the Wildstrubel. We weren’t really carrying enough equipment to risk a full-blown alpine storm and 2000m up on a ridge is about the last place you want to be when a storm hits.

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Jaunpass is a small ski station on the Jaun Pass in Bern, in winter it’s has three drag lifts only. We intended to do a quick tour around the Bäderhorn as we’d started out at around 2pm.

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This is a really small station on the Jaunpass which links nowhere in particular with nowhere else. It’s not very high, something like 1000m to 1600m and has only three T-bars plus a nursery slope.

It’s a nice little place and not busy even on a Sunday, it’s a bit of a drive up the pass in winter and you pass other stations on the way, for example Charmey which looked popular judging by the car park.

Some more photo’s in the gallery :

There’s some nice powder to ski through the trees as well, it’s all north facing so there’s not a lot of sun but the snow stays in great condition.

Click map for full size :