Dwight Peck's personal website

Summer 2007

An accidental walk up Mont Pelé


Mont Pelé in the Swiss Jura

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.

We're out for a little walk in nice weather, 17 June 2007, to see what there is to be seen. We're leaving the car at the meadow of Les Pralets (1265m, map below), and that's the farm at Les Pralets, in the general direction we're going in today.

That's Mont Sâla at 1511m above us to the northwest. But today we're wandering farther off to the left.

The idea has already occurred to us that we might totter on past Les Pralets and go up the meadow on the far left and work our way towards the big lump on the horizon, Mont Pelé at 1532m.

Another look at Les Pralets

Yellow things on the trees as we bushwhack up through the forest a ways

Dr Pirri starts to become more interested in the project as soon as the ground begins to steepen.

And still more so as the ground begins to steepen a lot -- awkward going with two arms needed to fend off swarms of flies, another arm in a plaster cast, and another two needed for hanging onto things while scrambling upwards.

Dr Pirri propelling himself upward amidst the clouds of flies. Maps are useless now, but up is up and we persist.

It takes a lot of mental discipline to ensure that, with every little slip and fall, you don't instinctively reach out and catch yourself with your free arm. Even if it's broken and has got a cast on it. The profanity ringing through the forest proves that Dr Pirri does not have that discipline.

A likely break through the cliffs, not hard to scramble up . . .

. . . even while keeping your cast out of harm's way.

As if by a GPS miracle, without the slightest idea of where in the world we were, we've emerged from the clouds of flies precisely at the top of Mont Pelé (1532m), and here Dr Pirri is gazing wistfully over towards La Dôle to the southwest.

A glance back down the forests on the southeast, front side of Mont Pelé.

The narrator on Mont Pelé, preparing to go home by way of the Cemetery of the Burgundians and the Combe des Begnines. Lake Geneva is in the background.

Some of the lovely countryside in the area

A super limestone hole on Mont Pelé, just northwest of the summit on the path out to Le Croue

Mind your step.

Dr Pirri admiring yellow trees

Yellow tree flowers

Yellow tree flowers are all over these forests today -- by mid-July they were all gone. Not the trees, just the yellow things.

Dr Pirri subsumed by yellowness

from SwitzerlandMobility (http://map.schweizmobil.ch/?lang=en)


Feedback and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative, . All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 22 September 2007, revised 25 September 2014.


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