This stage passes through the varied landscape of the Jura. The first kilometers go up steeply through forests, to Le Meix Musy near the Swiss border at 1288 meters with magnificent views of the Jura. Then the route descends a bit and continues to follow the Swiss/French border via Sentier de Bornes. Then the route remains mostly flat and runs mainly on small asphalt roads.
Today the weather is nice again and the legs are rested: so backpack up and on with the trek!
We walk about 2 kilometers along the main road back to the start of the GR5. From there it’s quite a climb; 540 meters up in 7.5 kilometers through the woods, passing the occasional farm.
We walk past cows through a meadow, where as we leave the meadow a farmer has plowed so diligently that the path can no longer be found. Even the GR5 sign lies on the ground, so it cannot guide us. We go the way we think is the right one, but too bad. After half a kilometer of slogging over newly-turned ground, the strip of what looked like a path comes to a dead end against a dense forest. We have no choice but to turn around.
Because of the wrong turn, we do encounter a plant that we do not yet know: the white sneeze root. It looks very similar to the gentian, but this one has clusters of small white flowers instead of large yellow or purple ones. We look it up and it turns out to be a poisonous plant that in earlier days was used for arrow poison. We walk back to the point where we lost the trail and then fortunately soon see something like markers on a tree. From here we follow an old wall of stacked natural stones over a ridge, along the Swiss-French border. There are also freshly white-painted white posts with red markings everywhere, indicating the border. Having reached the summit, we take a good break at the top of a ski slope, overlooking Villers-le-Lac, the village on the French side where we left this morning. We are already pretty high up.
After the break, we continue to follow the border for quite a bit, but the route becomes a lot flatter. Our final destination for the day is a cabin in the woods without a spring nearby, so along the route we have to find a place to get some extra liters of water.
Where the route turns away from the Swiss border, we enter a road where there should be a couple of gas stations, according to our map. That looks hopeful. We walk there, but it turns out to be some unmanned stations and there’s also no tap. Fortunately, a little further on in ‘the middle of nowhere’, we come across a fairly new activity center where skis are rented in the winter. In this season the skis have been replaced by bicycles, but there are also yoga, circus for children and clown dance classes. The building is open but there is no one there. Luckily for us there is a tap with drinking water, so we can fill some bottles with tap water. What a relief. It’s not plentiful, but it should be enough to get us through the evening and tomorrow morning.
The hut we planned to stay in, Cabane du Mont Châteleu, is about 7.5 kilometers away and the route from here runs mostly on small asphalt roads, but they are nicely situated among the meadows and hills.
Around 3 p.m. and after some searching we arrive at the cabin. It is somewhat hidden in the woods and it immediately feels like a nice place to spend the rest of the day and evening. A lovely little wooden house with a large table and windows with shutters; again, a great spot.
The only downside is that there is no well and the amount of water we brought turns out to be too little after all. So in the evening Mark walks back another 2.5 kilometers to fill a few bottles at a spring we saw earlier on the way there. By purifying and boiling the water, we have more than enough for soup, a cup of tea tonight and coffee tomorrow morning. We can even do the dishes in front of the cottage by the setting sun…
After washing the dishes, we enjoy a last cup of tea and a piece of chocolate in the cottage, before we set up our sleeping place. It’s peacefully quiet here…
