The Musbachtal is a small 2.6 km long steep and narrow carved valley with a creek at the bottom.

Location and geography

The valley stretches from the

Carthusian monastery This is a list of Carthusian monasteries, or charterhouses, containing both extant and dissolved monasteries of the Carthusians (also known as the Order of Saint Bruno) for monks and nuns, arranged by location under their present countries. Also ...

Freiburg im Breisgau Freiburg im Breisgau or simply Freiburg is the List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, fourth-largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg after Stuttgart, Mannheim and Karlsruhe. Its built-up area has a population of abou ...

(

Baden-Württemberg Baden-Württemberg ( ; ), commonly shortened to BW or BaWü, is a states of Germany, German state () in Southwest Germany, east of the Rhine, which forms the southern part of Germany's western border with France. With more than 11.07 million i ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

) to below the summit of the Roßkopf (

Black Forest The Black Forest ( ) is a large forested mountain range in the States of Germany, state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. It is th ...

). It is a

side valley Side valleys and tributary valleys are valleys whose brooks or rivers flow into greater ones. Upstream, the valleys can be classified in an increasing order which is equivalent to the usual orographic order: the tributaries are ordered from ...

of the

Dreisam The Dreisam (Celtic: ''*tragisamā'', "the very fast one") is a 29 km long river (48.8 km including its source river Rotbach), and a tributary of the Elz in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. The waters of the Dreisam feed the fam ...

valley and is heavily vegetated with mixed forest. It begins below the Rosskopf summit at an altitude of 463 m and ends in Freiburg's suburb Waldsee (forest lake) at an altitude of 320 m. There is also the Vogelsanghütte (birdsong hut).

Pilgrimage

The beginnings of the pilgrimage through the Musbach valley were between the 7th and the 13th centuries and it had its heyday in the 16th century. Through the lower part of the valley runs a

way of the cross The Stations of the Cross or the Way of the Cross, also known as the Way of Sorrows or the , are a series of fourteen images depicting Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion and accompanying prayers, These stations are derived from the im ...

Alemannic Pages: "View of the church St. Odile. This place of pilgrimage can be reached by a way of the cross or a winding forest road."
/ref> which ends at the end of the valley at the St. Odile chapel. In the 18th century eight stations of the cross were erected by Wolfgang Kleiser on the footpath which starts at the Kartäuserstraße (Carthusian street) and ends at the upper end of the valley in a clearing. These stations were renovated in 2003.

References

Valleys of Baden-Württemberg Black Forest Geography of Freiburg im Breisgau