Traversée du Massif Vosgien

The "Traversée du Massif Vosgien" is a 400-kilometer route crossing the Vosges mountain range in northeastern France. The route covers most of the Vosges mountain range, after which it is named. Vosges is made up of three arrondissements, 17 cantons, and 507 communes, including Domrémy-la-Pucelle, where Joan of Arc was born.The route will start at Wissembourg train station, west of Karlsruhe, and will follow the hills along the French-German border to warm up the legs and get a first taste of this region. The route has quite a few hiking shelters as well as hunters cabins that always provide a scenic shelter while en route. Underway we will travel through any number of nature reserves and wildlife reserves that the départements has protected for everyone. As the days and kilometers tick on, so does the climbing. Around the end of the second day we start seeing some of the prominent climbs, and by the third and fourth day we moved into the heart of the Vosges mountains. We’ve altered the route a little bit to take some of the “chill” gravel roads out and replace them with a few sometimes intense mountain bike trails, and we finish the route with the Grand Ballon, the highest point in the Vosges mountain range.Some of the singletrack will be hike-a-bike, but most of it will be just challenging enough to keep it interesting, but not crazy enough to warrant too much walking. Enjoy!