Palatine Watershed
In the southern Palatine Forest, the German part of the Wasgau, the Palatine Watershed begins on the French border in the area of the Erlenkopf hill (473 m above NHN), where it is a continuation of the watershed in the northern Vosges. Always generally running from southwest to northeast it initially heads eastwards past Eppenbrunn and Pirmasens over the Großer Schiffelskopf () and reaches the region of Gräfenstein Land. From there it runs up the Hortenkopf () in the central Frankenweide. Several kilometres it passes through the hamlet of Johanniskreuz (), one of the highest settlements in the Palatine Forest. The watershed then reaches the area west of Waldleiningen in the Lower Frankenweide.
List of mountains and hills of the Palatine Forest
The mountain range is formed from a slab of Bunter sandstone, about 500 metres thick, that is characterized by a complex relief with deeply incised V-shaped valleys, many different hill shapes and dense forests. Because its rock strata were tilted during the formation of the Upper Rhine Graben and descend from east to west, its highest points, which climb to over , are found in the Haardt, a long ridge that forms the edge of the Palatine Forest in the east above the Rhine Plain. In the central Palatine Forest is the plateau of Frankenweide, in which several more mountains are located that also exceed the 600 metre mark. By contrast, the hills in the north of the Palatine Forest, i. e. in the Stumpfwald and Otterberg Forest, only reach about 350 to ; they are largely embedded in erosion surfaces and rise only around 100 to 150 metres above them. Considerably more varied are the hills of the southern Palatine Forest, a region also known as the Wasgau which, as a unified natural region, crosses the border and runs as far as the Col de Saverne. Its small-scale surface topology includes numerous, different hill shapes – characterized by conical hills for example – with heights range from 450 to . They often exhibit bizarre rock formations, that in many cases have been used for the construction and location of rock and hill castles.