I really enjoy snowshoeing over near Les Diablerets, the scenery is always amazing as you’re under all the big cirques and cliff faces but you can find good trails on the forest and farm trails from summer. The ski lift that runs up towards the col de La Croix is pretty useful as well!
These first two shots are from a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been too busy to post them but they capture the scenery around the Isenau / Lac Retaud area so well that I really wanted to share them.
And now we cross the valley riding the the ski lift before snowshoeing up the summer road to the high point of the col de La Croix. This is a fairly long day out and we’re away from any infrastructure but there’s a whole host of places to have a great picnic stop.
These are actually sculptures of wolves, I’m sure I’ve posted a photo before and I can’t recall the whole story but they’re basically by a well known local sculptor. In summer I’m sure there’s an information board explaining it but right now a couple of metres of snow make that a bit hard to find.
There’s a lot of small summer farms, or alpages, around this area and they make great waypoints for a snowshoe route. In fact, there’s four little groups I use as waypoints as we make our way through high summer pastures before descending on some forest trails. After some snow during the week we were break trail for long section on this trip so it’s quite hard work!
That’s our tracks (above) coming from the small cross on a little summit. That’s made for a great picnic spot a couple of times this season. Here’s a closeup of the cross from before Christmas on a day with a lot less snow:
This photo (below) gives an idea how deep the snow was, if anything it’s understating it. On some section I was in snow that was over knee deep even with the extended float tails on my snowshoes.
