Stage over the highest peak in the Vosges Mountains: Le Grand Ballon at 1424 meters. From here, with good weather, there are magnificent views of the surrounding area and even as far as the Mont Blanc. From there the route descends all the way down into the plain of Alsace, to the town of Thann at 350 meters. A beautiful route that isn’t difficult to walk.
Early in the morning we wake up in “our” wooden cabin. It was a wonderfully dark, quiet night in the woods.
After getting up, we pack our things and put everything back in the cabin as we found it. Since we didn’t have much water left, we choose to make coffee somewhere along the way while hiking and have breakfast when we pass a spring or water tapping place.
The trail climbs fairly quickly at the beginning to the highest point of the hike so far, and also the highest point in the Vosges: le Grand Ballon at 1424 meters. At the top we walk past the monument des Diables Bleus and a large weather station. Magnificent views, amazing how far you can see! But today unfortunately not all the way to the Alps, there is too much moisture in the air to see them from so far away.
After a short descent we reach a col with a ski area and at a nice restaurant we finally drink our first cup of coffee. They have large jerrycan of drinking water outside for passing hikers and cyclists to fill drinking bottles. Lucky us!
From the highest point, the trail descends steeply to the plain of Alsace. After a few kilometers, we meet a lady from Thann, who was doing her daily hike around Grand Ballon (wow respect, at 57, hiking that many kilometers every day at dawn!). She knows the route like the back of her hand and walks with us for a bit. We have a nice conversation about hiking and the area in English. But as soon as we mention that we are practicing our French, she switches to her own language and gives us a lesson in French while walking. So nice, how French people we meet are open to teaching us a few more words!
After a while she walks on again, as she’s a little faster than we are. At our own pace, we continue walking and it is already starting to get quite warm. Today the temperature will rise to around 30°C, so we take it easy and are glad we left so early. The rest of the route is mostly through forests and we don’t have to climb anymore, so it’s good to keep going.
The GR5 spares us in the descent with wide paths that are easy to walk, and we pause somewhere with nice views of the valley. But we are still glad when we walk into Thann by 4 p.m. and we can fill our bottles at a fountain with delicious cool drinking water. After 6 days spent mostly in the mountains and after we had to look carefully a few times to see how we could get enough water, we look differently at the luxury of being able to fill our bottles with drinkable water. Delicious, what a treat this feels like!
We take the train to Cernay, where the campsite “les Cigognes” is located; the French word for storks and it lives up to its name. There are several storks nesting at the edge of the campground and every now and then they walk past our tent. Not a bad place to recover and spend a few days of 35+ degrees before we head out on the last 2 stages through the Vosges Mountains.
