The Ballon d’Alsace, a national listed site, is the highest point of the Comtois Vosges at 1250 m, and marks the meeting point of three regions. “The hiker who reaches the top can place one foot in Alsace, the other in Lorraine, and stretch his arm out over Franche-Comté. The horizon is too distant for his eyes to see,” wrote a climber from the 18th century.

The golden thatch of autumn and the blue horizon of the Vosges emerging from the mist: the poem of a walk late in the season, when the crowds have left and the peaks rediscover their solitude... For the Ballon d’Alsace, which can be reached very easily by road, is a major destination for walkers, thanks to the famous Club Vosgien walking club. Its members, here as elsewhere, work tirelessly to maintain a dense network of footpaths enabling visitors to tour the summit or to climb own to the lakes and ponds below, using the former schlitte or wood sled tracks.

Many of the mountain farmhouses have been transformed into inns. Visitors flock to the Ballon not just for the geography, but also for the history of this border post, which stretches back long before the Franco-German war commemorated by the statue to the memory of the 500 bomb disposal men who died ridding the area of mines.

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