Hiking Mont Sainte Odile

The other day, Leah and I hiked from our back door to Hohenburg Abbey, on the peak of Mont Ste. Odile, a hike of 7.9 km which Google Maps said would take a paltry 1 hour, 44 minutes. For reference, 8 km is 5 miles, so that's really not that hard to believe. Our hike, however, took closer to 3 1/2 hours, because Google forgot to count the 763 meter (~2200 ft) mountain we would be hiking.  This wasn't a surprise to us, but I'm just being thorough here...


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Our final destination

We set out a little later than we had hoped, around 9 AM, and promptly got lost in town.  After getting directions from a nice woman who told us it would take 5 hours to get to the abbey, we were on our way.  We then got lost as soon as we got out of town. 

These are the 'roads' we walked down

If you look at the map I posted above, the point at which our route turns off of the posted roads is exactly that when you're walking it.  We turned off of the posted road and started walking down what seemed to be cow paths, or maybe a farmer's driveway.  Because we were a little hesitant to do so, we missed our first turn and subsequently ignored all of the cross 'roads' until we got to Bernardswiller.  However, Leah was observant enough to see that we were on D109 there, so we just walked down that until we got to Saint Nabor, at the base of the mountain, and the real trails started.

This is some dude's driveway.

Nope.  It's the trail head!

We got lost here too.  The signs pointing us to the trails were nearly impossible to find, unless you knew what you were looking for.  We did not.  After wandering around a while, I stumbled onto the street that led up to the trail head, so we tried that out.  Here, we finally began to meet with success.  We also learned to stop trusting our gut and we began to look around until we actually found a sign pointing out which direction we should be going.

La Source Sainte Odile

Things started going better after that.  We would hike a bit, come to a crossing, look around, and eventually find a sign marking the continuation of the trail.  After about an hour, we came across La Source Sainte Odile, a natural rock spring where Ste. Odile hit the rock in a time of need, and healing waters miraculously began flowing, and thenceforth Ste. Odile began performing healing miracles there.  We also found that we were only about 10 minutes from the abbey at the peak.  This was good news, since we had gotten lost a few times and had been hiking around 3 hours at this point.

One of the overlooks

The view from the top

 Once we got to the abbey at the peak, we were pretty much exhausted.  But the view from the top was totally worth the hike.  If you expand the picture to the right, you can see the wall labeled 'Clos Sainte Odile,' which means Ste. Odile's Enclosure (a vineyard), and our apartment is just down the road from there.  Seeing that all the way in the distance really put into perspective how far we had hiked to get to that point.  Even though it was technically only 5 miles, it was definitely one of the hardest hikes I've been on in quite a long time.

We hiked down the mountain on a different trail.  There are a ton of different trails available on Mont Ste. Odile alone.  We found this sign on our way up, and it only partially illustrates how many trails are available.  There are probably a half dozen individual peaks nearby, and if each has this many hiking trails, we'll have plenty of options  when we get the urge to wander.

Update 10/5/11 - If you'd like to see the rest of the photos from this hike, click here.