Boudewijn van Doorn

I used to build companies. Now I read landscapes — and the Jura is the most surprising book I know.

​

For years I led IT businesses. Then the mountains took over: I trained, earned the Swiss federal mountain leader diploma, and in 2019 founded Peak2Peace. My home and main ground is the Jura, the folded, forested border country above Lake Geneva; I also spend part of my time at Champex-Lac, on the Alpine side near the Grand- Saint-Bernard, and I'll happily guide there too. But my stories come from the Jura. Anyone can show you a view. Here, every view has a story behind it — you just have to know where to look.

​

My Jura storytelling started with the Risoud forest, straddling the French-Swiss border — and what had happened there during the war. I read all the books I could find on these events, and started walking the sources: the chronology of the passeur network, Victoria Cordier and the women who ran it; this is a story about many courageous women, and people like Bernard Bouveret and Fred Reymond that knew one of the largest forest in Europe like no one. It is about the stones that have marked this border since the 1550s, each carved with multiple coats of arms facing two countries, narrating the European history since more than 500 years. Today that research has grown into an offering where every outing is a chapter of one of three stories: time, borders & beliefs, and craft.

​

There is a reason my border stories are about rescuers, not battles. In October 1944, my grandfather was taken from his village in a razzia, along with some 650 other men between 18 and 55 — Putten, in the Netherlands. Like most of the men of that village, he never came home; he died six weeks later in Neuengamme near Hamburg. I know what such events do — not only to the men who lived them, but to their families, down to the second and third generations. That is why, when I tell the story of a border, I tell the smugglers, the refugees and above all the people who helped: peace and collaboration, not division and trauma. That, quietly, is what the name Peak2Peace means.

​

What hasn't changed is the walking. I believe the best conversations happen at 3 km/h — that a day in the mountains is the most honest team meeting there is, and that a story you walk through is a story you keep. Whether it's a wildlife track in fresh snow, a Comté or Gruyère tasting at a fruitière, or the moment a group cracks the code of a two-hundred-year-old border stone: my job is to hand you the Jura, told properly.

​

See you on the trail — Boudewijn