Rhino

We drove a little further and are now at a campsite. The campsite is at a great location with a perfect view to Mt. Grand Veymont (2341m above sea-level).
The ridge to the summit looked very promising and there were also caches that are rated with T4. It seemed to be a good idea to climb this mountain. Because rain was in the forecast for tomorrow, we did it today. But when we got to the place where the ridge starts, we soon were disappointed. The path was a little beside the ridge and it was fairly flat terrain and it was quite easy to walk.
But at least the view from the summit was beautiful and once again we saw many flowers in bloom.

We drove a little further south with our motorhome.
There are currently almost no tourists here and we had no problem to find a wonderful place to spend the night.
The next day we hiked through a canyon, where we even had to climb a bit, and went to a 72m high waterfall, which can only be reached by wading barefoot through the cold water.
And again all the orchids were growing everywhere.

We are on a camping trip in France, but this time not with Nilpferd's little camper van but with a real motorhome! Klytemneistra now has a Fiat Ducato and it is very comfortable!
We are south of Grenoble in the Vercors-Mountains.
A friend of Nilpferd recommended this area to us because the alpine flowers bloom everywhere here.
We saw lots of orchids on our first hike and today the meadows were full of blooming flowers.
Very pretty!

Before the cable car to Mt. Herzogstand starts operating again tomorrow, we took the opportunity today to be at the summit without the masses of people.
We knew that there was still snow up there, but we hadn't expected that there is so much.
Nilpferd again and again sank up to its knees in the snow. The last section to the summit, which normally takes 20 minutes, took us 1 hour.
But we were all alone at the summit for a whole hour.

We had already discovered the "summit" (actually just a large boulder) in the Brauneck ski area with the two antennas on top many years ago and had already seen that there was a steel cable as an aid for the ascent.
Although Nilpferd had spent almost his entire working life with communications technology, he was unable to explain the purpose of the antennas at that time.
But now there is a cache right next to the antennas and we made another attempt.
The antenna cables led to a metal box at the foot of the rock, which was of course locked. But the key was hanging on the side of the box and Nilpferd couldn't resist to have a look inside.

In addition to a power supply unit and a overvoltage protector, the metal box contained a device from the American company Pacific Crest called "ADL Vantage" (what's that?).
The research showed that this system is used for an RTK (Real Time Kinematic) function.
A GPS receiver is located at a precisely measured position, which distributes the difference between the currently measured position and the correct position by radio.
The information is then sent to the snow groomers during slope preparation, which can determine their position with centimeter accuracy using their own GPS measurement and the correction data received by radio.
Therefore they can drive very precisely and this prevents them from accidentally hitting a cable car pole or rolling over a toilet cabin at the side of the ski slope at night or during a snowstorm 😁.
There was a sticker on the outside of the metal box saying "SNOWsat Repeater Station".
This indicates that the GPS receiver is at a different location and here only its correction signals are forwarded so that they can be received everywhere in the ski area.
Oh, that was a lot of technology today, but after we had climbed „Mt. Antenna“ we climbed another real mountain.