A last weekend in the snow ...

Frolicking in deep snow will be a thing of the past after this northern winter. While Australia does have ski resorts and areas in which to go snow-shoeing, they are not as inspiring as those of the Alps. It's not just the shallow wet snow, it's also the lack of refuges scattered through the hills. These are not refuges in the sense of somewhere to escape from bad weather, but places where you can get good hearty food and a glass of wine or beer, as well as a place to sleep the night if you need to.

We had a wonderful time snow-shoeing in San Bernardino at Christmas, and we back again in February when Karen's brother came to stay for a week. During this 2nd visit, we achieved our goal of snow-shoeing right to the top of the San Bernardino pass itself. I'm not sure that Allan had such an adventure in mind on his flight over, and certainly not one where the tavern at the pass was closed for the winter.



Our more recent outing was very pleasant but without such adventure. The mountains either had too little snow for show-shoeing or had very high avalanche alerts because of the instability of the snow higher up. So we did more traditional hiking with our friends Pierre and Marielle who have been living in Switzerland now for some 13 years.

Because we only have the Lotus left as road transport, we used the very efficient Swiss train system to get from Lugano to Sedrun.   4 trains all of which were scheduled to connect, with very precise 5 minute gaps between arrival and departure at each station.   Each leg was more dramatic than the previous as we headed higher and higher, finally crossing the Oberalpass at 2,033 metres.