return to the Brocken

The Harz mountains are the go-to hiking spot for all of northern Germany and the rest of the low countries. This little bit of topographical relief is centered on the Brocken, a rather flat-topped prominence of 1200 meters. Coming from the western U.S., it's a bit hard to call this a "mountain", but the area is nonetheless beautiful, offering lakes and forests and peace and recreation.

This time we started the hike at the town of Bad Harzburg and walked 13 km up to the top. One interesting point along the way is the Eckerstausee, a reservoir that was divided in half by the German-German border during the time of divided Germany. Even the face of the dam was `zerschnitten` by the border. The trail goes along the crest of the dam, and 2/3rds of the way across one encounters a concrete pillar striped in faded black, red, and gold, the former demarcation between West and East (and now between the states of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt). (Here are some photos from 1978 of the border.)



We took the little dog along. I was expecting she might tire out and need to be carried, but it turns out the she LOVES HIKING and has INFINITE ENERGY. While the rest of us walked about 20 km, the little dog must have done about twice that, as her latent herding instincts kicked in and she commuted between the leaders and stragglers of the group, always watchful that everyone was accounted for. Even the next day, she showed only the slightest evidence of fatigue.

One difference between a walk in the woods in north America and one in Germany is that here one is quite likely to stumble upon a beer garden just about the time one is getting peckish. So at a place just below the reservoir called Molkenhaus I enjoyed a tall Hefeweizen and a rack of spare ribs (if the little dog wasn't having the Best Day Ever already, the left-over bones made it a red-letter day for sure), and of course a the top there was Wiener sausages and Sauerkraut and Schwarzbier and even Apfelstrudel.

One of our party decided to take the steam train down, while the rest of us walked down to Torfhaus via the Goetheweg. From Torfhaus we needed to get back to the car in Bad Harzburg. The next bus would come in 45 minutes. Instead I stuck out my thumb, and in the Most Efficient Hitchhiking Ever, the first car stopped, the three of us and the dog piled into the back, and we were back at our car in 10 minutes. Hitchhiking in nature parks always works amazingly well.

The steam train arrived in another town, Wernigerode, which we discovered to have not just a beautiful old town dating from the ~1500's and a castle on a hill but also a summer "castle festival", very much to the delight of our American guests, who exclaimed that it was "as German as they could imagine".

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Here's a comparison of the Brocken summit scene from a winter trip last January:

yet another Little Dog photo

It's been exactly four years since I found her on the LIGO access road in Livingston, Louisiana!