Today we mainly follow the valley of the Cébriot River. A beautiful, quiet valley without much climbing and descending. The route runs mostly over beautiful meadows. Only the last part of the route climbs out of the valley through forests to le Pré d’Haut at 1250 meters altitude.
We wake up after a good night at the Source du Doubs campsite. It was a wonderfully quiet and dark night. French campsites have the bad habit of putting lamp-posts near the tent pitches, so it’s rarely dark in our little tent. This campsite was an exception and that slept wonderfully.
Today we only have a short stage ahead of us, less than 20 kilometers and without too much ascending or descending, so we are in no hurry. Around a quarter to 9 we leave the campsite and follow the Doubs River at the foot of the mountains to the village of Mouthe. Here we do some shopping in the supermarket for during the day, but especially for tonight, when we’ll be wild camping again. Packed and sacked, we continue our trek and leave the Doubs. We walk along a small side river, the Cébriot. At first still along the main road, but pretty soon on paths and through meadows. The grass is high and already beginning to turn yellow here and there. The spring flowers have given way to the summer flowers. Willowherbs, meadowsweet and various umbelliferous plants such as spotted hemlock and dead man’s finger brighten the fields.
We walk on to the village of Chaux-Neuve, where we buy a few bottles of water at the local gas station a.k.a. grocery store a.k.a. village café. This provides us with just enough water to get us through the day and evening. For an extra cup of coffee along the way, we hope to find another spring. It always surprises us how much water you need to drink and cook with; 3-4 bottles is the minimum. But that also adds about 5-6 kilogram to the weight of the backpacks, so the trick is to carry just enough.
A little further on at a lavoir, we see the travelling couple with horses that we met yesterday. They let their horses drink from the water trough.
After the village, where ski jumping is practiced over a large slope in winter, the trail leads past a couple of lakes back into the meadows. It is an elongated strip of fields, about a few hundred meters wide, between forests and over hills. We find a nice spot to take a break in the shade, here at the edge of the forest. On the map we see that there should be a spring nearby and Mark goes to get water. Yeay, a cup of coffee for lunch!
From here the trail turns away from the meadows and runs through woods a bit up the slope.
In the forest there are again many raspberries and strawberries, so frequent stops are made for a handful of fresh fruit. Among the strawberries are plants with bright red berries, which we assumed would not be edible. But we look up the name of this plant with an app (long live technology!) and it turns out to be the stoneberry. In the Netherlands it’s listed as protected and very rare, but here it’s common. And the berries turn out to be perfectly edible indeed, they taste a bit like red currants. We’ll add those to our (wild) fruit diet!
Near the top of the mountain Le pré d’Haut at 1250 meters is a little hut (Abri de Chalotet), where we plan to spend the night nearby. It turns out to be a large sloping canopy with a picnic bench under it, in the middle of a meadow with a group of curious cows. We put our backpacks down and when Mark heads out to look for a place to set up the tent, the cows curiously come closer to take a look at Malou under the shelter. Normally cows are more afraid of us than we are of them, but these are very bold and clearly do not adhere to social distancing…
Fortunately, Mark is back soon. He has found an open spot in the forest with a nice flat area to pitch the tent. In the evening, all we hear is the sound of birds and cowbells in the distance. What a wonderful place again to spend the night again!
