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Chalet-à-Gobet
872 m
Vaud
Le Chalet-à-Gobet is barely a pass at all – a gentle forested saddle at 872 metres on the Jorat plateau, the wooded roof of the city of Lausanne, which reaches all the way up to it from the lake.
872 m
Vaud
Le Chalet-à-Gobet is barely a pass at all – a gentle forested saddle at 872 metres on the Jorat plateau, the wooded roof of the city of Lausanne, which reaches all the way up to it from the lake.
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DESCRIPTION
Le Chalet-à-Gobet is barely a pass at all – a gentle forested saddle at 872 metres on the Jorat plateau, the wooded roof of the city of Lausanne, which reaches all the way up to it from the lake. The little col gives access northward toward Bern, and marks the watershed between the basins of the Rhône and the Rhine. Its name is said to come from Jean Gubet, mayor of Lausanne in 1448. Around it spreads the Jorat, the largest contiguous woodland in the Swiss Mittelland – its name, like Jura, from the Celtic word for forest – a massif so rich in wetlands and marshes that, were Lake Geneva ever heavily polluted, it could supply the region with water.
That great forest has a darker past: once managed by the Church, it became the haunt of the "Jorat robbers", bands of brigands armed with knives, swords and bludgeons who ambushed the pilgrims, merchants and noblemen crossing it. Today it is altogether gentler – the heart of the Parc naturel périurbain du Jorat – while the Chalet-à-Gobet itself has become Lausanne's green playground: the renowned EHL hotel school, two golf courses, and the World Archery Excellence Centre, opened in 2016, with the grassy plain of Mauvernay and its woods a delight for walkers, joggers and mountain bikers – and, above all, a beloved training climb for the city's road cyclists. Not a mountain crossing, but the green lung and high doorstep of Lausanne.
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