Lac Brenet, in the Jura mountains of canton Vaud, Switzerland
Winter walk around an altitude mountain lake
Just 1-hour train ride from home, we are up at 1000 m above sea level in the town of Le Pont, at the junction of Lac de Joux and Lac Brenet. The former is around 10 km long, the latter is much smaller and you can walk around it in just 1 hour, very easily. This is a very cold region, so it gets snow early on!
Today we just hiked around Lac Brenet with perfect snow: enough to not only see it but also feel it, but not too much that we’d need snowshoes; and very fresh hence soft and absorbing all sounds, creating that unique sensation of serenity.
This first photo is of Lac de Joux, right from the “center” of the town of Le Pont. It was snowing steadily, as you can appreciate…
From here we move North and begin the walk all around Lac Brenet, featured in the lead photo. Here are some shots of the first half of the walk, in which you move through the forest quite close to the shore:
Intermezzo: find more photos of this hike, focusing on snow-covered plants, here:
And… how about a 360-degree photo to feel like you are right there? Try https://lucianoabriata.altervista.org/tests/panolens/360view3.html
where you can look around in different directions with your fingers or mouse if you are in “Touch" mode or directly by moving your smartphone if you choose “Sensor" mode. And you can load that page on the web browser of your VR device to see it even more immersively, really like you are literally there!
With so much snow, I eventually got some on my hair… Look at this perfectly hexagonal snowflake that my wife captured:
By the way, did you know that the invariably hexagonal patterns are due to the 6-fold geometry of the arrangement that water molecules have in the frozen state? This arrangement looks something like this (my finger points at a hydrogen bond, in yellow):
I’m showing here a set of water molecules with the Virtual Modeling Kit 3.0 web app of moleculARweb, a website for chemistry and biology education in commodity augmented reality:
We enter the last half of the walk and then several bushes with red fruits covered with snow show up:
And then an even cooler surprise! A small herd of Chamois shows up. They didn’t care about us, so I could take several photos:
One last view of Lac Brenet before we finish the hike to go back home:
And last a shot from the train ride back home, that looked quite Game Of Thrones Winter Is Coming Hack -ish
I featured this region and these lakes in previous stories happening in summer:
Compare how different this region looks in winter against these other shots I made last week in the Alps, just < 100 km away but constituting a totally different geological formation and climate:
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