Something of a day off after a busy Christmas and New Year, we did have guests in the B&B and arrivals tonight but we had time to get over to the Col des Mosses and do some nordic skiing in perfect conditions. We parked at the far end of the loops in La Lécherette and skied to Les Mosses where we enjoyed lunch before skiing back.

Conditions on the pistes, nordic and alpine, are perfect right now and it’s fairly quiet so it’s very pleasant to be out and about.

Tags: Col Des Mosses | Nordic Skiing | XC skiing

Not too many photo’s from the last few days due to the weather and cold temperatures. On Christmas day we went over to La Sagne to ski down the Vallée de La Sagne, there’s a rail line along the valley running every hour or so and we planned to ski out, find some lunch and then catch the train back to the end station at Les Ponts-de-Martel where we’d left the car.

When we got to La Sagne I wasn’t sure if anywhere would be open so the vending machine might have been an option, a bar of chocolate in a cold waiting room probably isn’t the traditional Christmas lunch though. Fortunately a local hotel was open and we got lunch there.

Next day, Boxing day, was still as cold but clear skies and sunshine makes a large difference so it felt a lot more pleasant. The snow was also much better, it really wasn’t a good glide on Christmas day and today it was much better. We actually found a nice restaurant at Les Attis as well which I’d really recommend for anyone in the are.

After a couple of days of skiing on tracks I took a day to do some Nordic backcountry touring. The area between the Col du Mollendruz and the Col du Marchairuz is great for this, a series of small climbs and descents that’s ideal for nordic touring. I took a long climb from Petra Félix so used the skins I recently cut down from some old skis rather than rely on the fish-scales on my touring skis.

Tags: Cross Country Skiing | Jura | Nordic Skiing | XC skiing

Just in time for the weekend we got some more snow. It was a pretty serious couple of days of weather over in the Doubs department and around the Jura generally, school buses were cancelled on Friday and lorries were restricted from moving on many roads. By yesterday morning the roads were still difficult in places even driving our Subaru on winter tyres but, fortunatly, it wasn’t busy at all which makes it a lot easier to drive.

A lot of the area at Les Fourgs was going to open, probably as much as they could get out and prepare. I’d really wanted to depart from La Vraconnaz just inside Switzerland but I’ve never been there before and I couldn’t find the piste depart, in fact I’m not sure the snowploughs had found it either and we could tell from the one piste we saw that the pistes weren’t prepared. So, we hopped over the border and parked at the nordic centre in Les Fourgs.

They could really do with some better signs and maps around here, in fact pretty much over the whole of the Jura the signs aren’t very good. When I did the Grandes Traversées du Jura last season it was a similar story, in places it was very hard to know where the trail went and the official trail maps aren’t always very useful. We struggled to find the liaison trail from the nordic centre and although we did the circuit we wanted it really should be much easier.
I’m going to start creating OpenPistemap trails I think, it should make things easier for other people and I can download maps to my own wrist-top GPS if I want to.

Tags: Cross Country Skiing | Jura | Nordic Skiing | XC skiing