La Bourgeoise, France

The weather was very much the same again, looking through the books did not turn up anything, but there was a faint reference to a show-shoe route up a nearby peak - La Bourgeoise.

The aim was to drive up to the col and then follow the ridge to the top. However the route was closed by a snowdrift before the col at a hairpin, that also happened to have a track leading off it.

So leaving the car there we set off up the track and into the woods .. we quickly lost all traces of the track and no one had been up there recently.

Struggling in the general direction we wanted to go, we were experiencing at first hand, why navigation and travel in the forests is some much hard work...  the snow drifts around the trunks and making tracks takes a lot of effort. Navigation is not straight forward as there are no direct lines.

Eventually we popped out the first woods onto a clearer space which would probably have been the vehicle track in the summer, but here was just a clearing.

After struggling up for a couple of hours and several times thinking we were much further along than we actually were (nowadays you would use a GPS to show exactly where you were, but then this was a difficult technology to carry). We took the decision to retreat back the way we had come.

Slowly skiing back down our tracks ..  controlled skiing in tight circumstances, really stretched our techniques.

The last stretch through the woods at the bottom was the most enjoyable as the trees thinned out.

Since then I have always been suspicious of the heavily wooded areas, and definitely made large time allowances for this.