Mouthe

Mouthe holds France’s official record for the coldest temperature ever recorded in a permanently inhabited settlement, minus 41 degrees Celsius, set in 1985, and the village wears the distinction with something close to pride. Locals call it “la petite Sibérie,” the little Siberia, and even in the relatively mild week we visited — late autumn, well above freezing — there was a bite in the air coming off the surrounding forest that made the nickname feel earned rather than exaggerated for effect.

Where the Doubs river starts

Just outside the village, a short walk through beech and spruce forest leads to the Source du Doubs, the spring where the Doubs river — one of the region’s major waterways, which loops through the Jura and eventually forms a stretch of the Swiss border — first emerges from the limestone. It’s a modest thing to look at, water welling up quietly at the base of a rock face into a clear pool, but there’s something satisfying about tracing a river you’ve crossed elsewhere back to this exact unglamorous point of origin. Lia insisted on dipping a hand in, out of some instinct to touch a river at its beginning, and reported it was exactly as cold as it looked.

A village built for snow

Mouthe’s whole character is shaped by its altitude and its cold, and it shows: this is cross-country skiing country, part of a network of groomed trails, the Jura Nordic domain, that connects villages across the high plateau for kilometers at a stretch. In winter the village becomes a genuine base for skiers rather than a stopover, with rental shops and trail maps replacing the summer’s hikers and rock climbers. We came in the shoulder season and mostly had the forest paths to ourselves, pine needles underfoot instead of snow, imagining what the same walk would feel like buried under a meter of it.

When to go: January and February for cross-country skiing at its best, though the source of the Doubs is a rewarding short walk in any season.