SnowSlider – Blogging From the mountains by ise

I was over at Les Fourgs on Monday for some nordic skiing and thought we’d pop over today for a snowshoe tour in the same area. When I’d been skiing I’d seen a few signs for “Sapin Président” and wondered what it was so we went to take a look. Not surprisingly it’s a tree! Quite a big tree in fact and one that’s around 450 years old.

I’d no idea who Edgar Faure was but he’s a local politician who died in 1988 having occupied a number of high offices such as Prime Minister and President of France and several positions in the legislatures of thelocal departments.

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!