Tags
alpine pasture, beautiful scenery, beauty, fabulous scenery, Frence, French, frozen streams, Haute Savoie, Mountains, nature, outdoors, restaurants, The Alps, weather, winter
Well the ski season is well under way and after my little accident (with a little visit via ambulance to hospital in November) I am still unable to ski, so what does one do when you can’t ski – snow shoe, it is great fun and takes you through some fabulous scenery.
The art to snow shoe walking is not tripping up on the shoes themselves which are a little wide and have gnarly teeth at the front, or tripping over your poles. If you are not tripping over the poles they are sinking in the snow, this means plenty of laughter and falling around.
This week has seen me do 2 walks, the first was one I call the bridge walk, my friend calls it the planet walk, it is a lovely easy walk, one which you can have a good old chat whilst meandering along. It starts in Morgins, Switzerland which is a border village next to ours and the walk takes approximately 45 minutes along the river bank, with small waterfalls that have frozen into ice sculptures, snow sitting on rocks half way across the stream and finishes at a funny looking little refuge where you can stop for a small snack or drink before wandering back.
The second walk, oh yes that was very different it is called Bassachaux Pass & Plaine Dranse, it has a difficulty level of DIFFICULT (this should have warned me!!) it passes over 3 frozen streams and is more or less straight up the mountain. Whilst walking up the steep, non forgiving mountain, sometimes ‘hors piste’ my friend likes to take a different route to the marked area! She tells me it is so we can make fresh tracks, but I just kept wondering what is underneath all this snow – and more importantly am I about to fall into a big crevasse. The walk continues towards the Grande Pans alpine pasture where the wind was whipping through the trees, I felt like an intrepid explorer with civilization thousands of miles away – would we make it…… on and on we went heading to the Col de Bassachaux – or should that be crawling the last part as it was so steep and with so much snow it was the only way. In my walking book it states for those with enough stamina you can continue from the Col de Bassachaux to Plaine Dranse – are they kidding?? Of course I was heading for Plaine Dranse – I needed to get to a lovely warm restaurant with a roaring fire and a big hot chocolate as I could no longer feel either my hands or my feet and then I wanted Pierre-Longue lift back down.
fabinthealps 