J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by ise

Le Crêt de la Neige is about 4km from the refuge, apparently measurable tectonic activity has altered the height of it by a couple of meters which is pretty amazing :shock:

The Jura are a range of mountains separating the Rhine and Rhone rivers along the French-Swiss border. Despite our valley house being just below the Jura in the years we've been here I've never much explored the Jura instead going to the alps. But last summer I was climbing a lot in the Jura with a friend who lives in Annecy as the Jura is handy for both of us and I thought how great the area was for winter touring. It's an obvious idea to make a traverse of the whole length of the mountain chain so I set out this week to cross the Jura on skis. Given the rolling terrain it makes sense to use nordic touring gear, longer skinny skis ideal for covering larger distances on rolling terrain.

So I took a train, bus and taxi journey to Giron in the Ain department of France to start a route called the GTJ or the Grande Traversée du Jura français, my plan is to use this for a day or two before hopping over the border into Switzerland and picking up the Traversée du Jura Suisse (TJS) which is a bit wilder and technically harder. I dropped into the tourist office at Giron for a chat and they rather kindly offered me a ride up the mountain to avoid some poorer snow low down which saved me about an hours skiing I'd think, that was handy as the public transport had taken me to nearly lunch time to get to Giron so I was on a fairly tight schedule.





It's not a great day really in terms of weather so I'm reduced to taking photo's of signs, although I did think the forestry sign was pretty funny.







That's the refuge I used for the first night, extremely basic but it has running hot water and power which is more than we get in the winter in the high alps. The guardian produced some good food and it was comfortable enough, there were only two other people staying so it was pretty quiet.



Leaving at dawn the next morning I got to enjoy a pleasant hour or so skiing in the early morning light, it was pretty cold but I was able to cover a lot of ground fairly quickly which was useful as I was heading for a long day to reach the Swiss border.









Somewhere between these farms a dog appeared and started to follow me, I looped back a few times trying to lose it but each time I thought he'd gone he'd suddenly bound out of the forest wagging his tail and rolling around in the snow. After a couple of km it was pretty clear he was just going to keep following me and since we were in a remote area there wasn't a lot I could do really. After about 5km from where I first saw him I detoured to a small village and asked for some help at the local hotel. Fortunately they were happy to take my new friend and try and find the owner so here he is wondering where his new best friend is going without him :



By now the cloud had rolled in and I was behind schedule so I had to put a sprint on to avoid finishing in the dark and skiing by head torch. But I managed to reach my overnight stop in La Cure on the border just after 1600 after skiing about 38 km.



La Cure is an odd place sitting on the border and the hotel I used was split between France and Switzerland but mostly French I think and they were billing in euros so I think were more French than Swiss. It was actually pretty good, a high level of luxury if you're used to gites and mountain huts so I spent a pleasant night ready for the next morning and the first legs of the Traversée du Jura Suisse

live_Ade wrote:it maps straight to google maps on your PC..i've just updated the software and it seems to have a new section that is aimed at sport so i'm interested to see what it does. It has a button you press when you take a photo and then you can add pictures to your trip at the exact location you took them.

That's probably not needed, if you have a file that Google Earth can read I assume it's some type of mark-up language like KML or GPX. That can be read by a bit of software that can look at the capture times of your photo's and work out where you were. That software can then update the metadata of the photograph to have the location of the photograph.

huh? :-)



If you click that it takes you to a larger version of the same photo. That larger version has loads of other data in it, metadata in the trade which is data about data. So the metadata for this photo has the latitude and longitude it was taken at as well as the altitude. That's coded in from a track file produced by a Garmin Oregon 550t GPS.

An online read is available and if you follow this link it will display all the metadata for my photo :

http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsnowslider.net%2Fgallery%2Fimages%2F2010_nordic%2F2010_01_15_col_du_mollendruz%2F20100115-124804.jpg

What you need is to make sure your GPS and camera have their times synced and some software, on the the Mac I use HoudahGeo and on a PC there's some things around but I don't know the names. You can upload photo's to specialist services like panaramo which provide the links you see in Google Earth. You see some appalling locations there though which I suspect is due in part to how massively inaccurate these GPS loggers are. Also, Flickr can read this stuff so this is the same image :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snowslider/4282199946/

and they read my data to work out where this was taken.

This is all good stuff, I take over 5000 images a year and having a good proportion of them tagged with locations is useful. As this becomes more common we'll see an ability to search Google Images by location as well which will be great.

scapula wrote:I have wondered if it is possible to have a different edge angle on each side of the ski..as it is the downhill ski that we are sking on... so if we had "left" and "right" skis and (for example) had 1 degree on one edge and 3 degrees on the other you could swop them over according to conditions?? bad idea? or mad idea?

people do that, mostly racers of course although obviously not with the intention of swapping them over. I don't think it would work out for general skiing though, more to the point, 3 degrees is a bit too much for normal skiing, it won't work on anything steep and icy for a start.

But just practically, any longish varied piste and you'll see a variation of pitch and terrain as you ski down so you'd need to stop and swap your skis over which isn't practical and know what's around every corner. If you're on a small hill without much vertical drop, no real variation of gradient or terrain you might find some extreme angle works out but otherwise it's not going to pan out and you're going to trash your skis, increasing angles is obviously easy enough but going back from a high angle means you've got to remove a lot of edge material, and probably sidewall although that's not too serious, and given how little is on most skis you'll regret that.

goff wrote:
Try and stay here
http://www.hotel-marchairuz.ch/
Found this web site on the Ridgeway .
activityworkshop.net/hiking/jura/lepont-coldemarchairuz.html
Will not be taking on any thing epic without a guide

Goff

I was very unimpressed with the place in the end, I thought their price was high considering it didn't include evening meal (which wasn't cheap), the room was basic for the price with lino' floors and cheap pine beds but worse I thought was the breakfast, a couple of slices of bread and some jam with a cup of coffee and a thimble of fruit juice. I wasn't wildly impressed to be turned away from breakfast at 0745 either, that's pretty late really and they'd decided it wasn't starting until 0800 which is poor if you want tourers to be stopping.


I'll post some photo's tomorrow but I managed around 100km plus of the traverse over 4 days and it's pretty good.

not very likely, but we can do it the other way around if you prefer. 3' on either the base or side isn't a good idea.

Tognar have some good information on edge angles on their website :

http://tognar.com/bevel_edge_tips_file_bevel_ski_snowboard.html

As they point out, if you're expecting to be on steep ice you don't want angles of 3 degrees or more, that ought to be fairly obvious, if you stand on a slope upright you'll tend to stay there, if you lie down on it you'll tend to slide to the bottom, there's some physics to that but basically the lower the angle between you and the slope then the quicker you'll slide down it. Another, and equally obvious, reason not to knock a few degrees off you edges is you'll have to remove a lot of edge material to get back to a sensible edge angle.

That said, I'd take their comments about graduating the edge angles with a pinch of salt, I can't detect a difference and I really think it doesn't apply so much to the curvier skis we've got nowadays, I can release my ski for a tight turn on steep ground without needed to graduate the edge, partly that's due the twin tip style most modern skis have and partly it's about not letting your ski get caught up in the rubble moving around when you're in somewhere steep.

it's 112 all over Europe, anywhere in the world using a GSM phone and most other countries

it's not worth remembering local numbers and they may not always work, you can use 112 when your phone is not allowed to make any other calls when it's showing "emergency calls only" on the screen.