Dwight Peck's personal website

The Grande Baume du Pré d'Aubonne

A brief scenic wander in a lot of squishy new snow


You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

Flinging the camera about near the Col du Marchairuz, 21 March 2013

We've just had a load of heavy new snow, Arctic ice melt and all that, and just having come from a big lunch, it's very slow going today. That's okay, we're just off on a whatever.

The farm at Pré d'Aubonne, with interesting snow drifts

The front side of it

And now we'll carry on, in mid-calf new snow . . . slowly.

Pré d'Aubonne. We're taking more photos than usual today, because it's a welcome excuse to stop for a while to haul the camera out.

The sun's trying desperately to peek through.

Another brief pause to dig the camera out

More precisely, we're wandering in the forest looking for the superhole in the ground called the Grande Baume du Pré d'Aubonne.

And like those migratory birds with magnetic things in their foreheads so they can show up in South Africa at the same time every year, we've been led by fate directly to the Grande Baume.

A huge hole, a caver's delight -- my former neighbor Christine got led through the thing by her spelunker brother back in the day. (It's not for me.)

By the look of the snow around the lip of it, someone's shimmied down there already this winter.

125m (410 feet) deep, the thing is, with nearly 800 metres of walking-round room down in it.

We're pretty much as close to it as we need to be, though.

Goodbye, Grande Baume.

New snow being unconsolidated, lunch being unconsolidated, we'll abandon our big hiking plans for today and just make a loop through the forest back to the faithful VW, called Dieter.

It's a nice open forest, and the sun's coming out.

Long plods over the pastures

More long plods over the pastures, and a little welcome help on some of the tan.

We've circled round the farm of Pré d'Aubonne

Traffic on the Marchairuz road over to the Vallée du Joux. Before somebody decided to open this road in the winter, in about 1993, the Swiss commuters from the Vallée du Joux had a brutally circuitous route to get to work. So life is better now.

Pré d'Aubonne on Zoom

A retrospective glance at our track and the French Alps on the far side of Lake Geneva

Thanks for waiting.

Well, that was fun.

GO!


Feedback and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative, . All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 26 March 2013.


Recent Events