The Oujon forest in the snow, 2010

Dwight Peck's personal website

First good snow for 2010

Aimless wandering, totally lost, in fairly brisk 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.

An early snowstorm in Switzerland, and we forgot to bring the map.

We're out for a promenade in late November 2010, and as always we're wishing that the snow would come along soon.

The fog's in over Lake Geneva, and the sky over the meadows of Les Echadex looks like it wants to do . . . something.

21 November, the farm at Chenevières with some ridiculous little patches of frost under the trees. But we can dream.

Our dream is fulfilled, 27 November, and our car is stuck. We were overconfident at the top of the road above Bassins, and the bow wave of snow turned out to be more than Dieter VW was prepared for.

Twenty minutes of scooping him out, and Dieter's right as rain. Or snow.

Dieter's going to wait for us here, a ways farther down the mountain at La Pessette. We forgot to bring along a map, so we'll be improvising today.

Our first surprise an hour later, a forestry road we've never seen before.

A road's got to go somewhere. Which is not really true of forestry roads, but we'll have a look anyway.

Yikes! Merde, alors!

We're continuing upwards, bewildered, but curious.

This would be easy with the map in hand.

A third broad meadow, the phantom road continues upward, and the wind picks up.

And an hour later, as we were trying to think of where this road could possibly go, it stopped. The tiny path ahead doesn't look promising at dusk, so we're taking the better part of valor and following our tracks out of here.

Though our tracks are gone now, and it's snowing horizontally again. The map subsequently showed that bushwhacking a further few hundred meters on from our high point would have put us near the top of the Bassins road, but never mind.

After a long, hot summer, we're exulting.

And congratulating ourself for having turned up this sturdy Columbia coat for $25 at the charity store in Boston. It's just paid for itself.

Some tracks are left, and we're loping awkwardly now.

Near Les Frasses above Bassins, a farm vehicle has been through to pack down a useful track.

Twenty minutes out and possibly in time to catch the BBC World News at the hour.

Dieter's fine, we needn't have worried.

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