Through the woods to Les Pralets farm

Dwight Peck's personal website

Winter 2016-2017

In the awful, hopefully only, Year of Trump

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.

Through the woods to Les Pralets farm

Some bushwhacking, and evading the tree-cutters at lunchtime

We're starting in uncertain weather from La Pessette on the Rue de Montagne above the village of Bassins, 19 October 2016. That's the farm of La Dunanche.

An information panel. The odd shape of the commune, like a gerrymandered Repuglican congressional district in Wisconsin, is not uncommon here, as most of the villages below the forests include their own communal pastures straight up to the top of the Jura ridge.

Our first obstacle (in a day of many)

Company. We'd been under the impression that there were no free-range bulls allowed out around here.

We're making all prudent haste towards the forest.

He'll have to await the next unsuspecting hikers who pass through his pasture.

Dr Joe leads us up an insignificant little path in the hope that it leads somewhere.

And it does -- it comes out onto the forestry road out of the Bois d'Oujon, at 1168m, and this will lead us comfortably farther up the hill.

Our only inconvenience (aside from the gate) is that where the road ascends into the forest again at the top left of the photo there is a barricade set up by the foresters forbidding access, because the coupe de bois is in progress.

But we hear nothing (forestry is very loud), and it's lunchtime, so we make a run for it. We get only a few mildly disapproving from the woodcutters huddling in their trucks out of the rain, with their sandwiches.

Eventually the road becomes a track, and then that becomes a faint path, and then that disappears. But Dr Joe doesn't care a whit about that.

.

We're standing on the "summit" (1357m) of a wooded bump on the horizon called Lorette on the maps, just southwest of the Mondion farm but ringed by cliffs around the eastern and southern sides of it.

Dr Joe's hiking companion for today

We're skirting the cliffs on the eastern side because we prefer to lumber awkwardly down the gentle slopes off the northern side.

Out onto the pastures

A bit more forest, and now the huge pastures of Petite Enne

The length southwestward of the Petite Enne pastures -- the Grand Enne is beyond the trees on the far right.

Now, after some wet and awkward scrambling in the muddy forest "La Vy des Gros", we've stumbled onto the path between the Grande Enne farm and Les Pralets, with Mont Sâla looming behind.

Les Pralets (1271m), a working farm and a mountain restaurant alongside the long-distance cross-country ski track in front of its doors.

Les Pralets

A look back across the Combe de la Valouse, a 60m deep hollow amid the pastures around Mondion

We're unfortunately going to have to walk all the way back down on the Rue de Montagne

A zoom of the same, looking at our little Lorette 'summit' on the far side of the pastures

The Rue de Montagne from Bassins up to La Bassine (1265m)

Passing the shrine to the huge pine tree, the Président des Rochers

And passing the farm of Le Crot at 1225m

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