Hiking to the Czech Republic

After reading the manual to my camara, I discovered the "Compose this next shot for me, and make it look cool" button. Something to do with F-stops I think. I started to fancy myself a photagrafer, and took 247 pictures on this hike.

The new American brewing intern and his girlfriend and I had set our weekend plans to a hike in the Bayerische Wald, some of the only unindustrialized forest land in Germany. In a country where every hedge is neatly trimmed, every square meter debated and planned, I longed for a walk in the wilderness.

The problem is that you still need to bring a map and compass and do a bit of planning, even though you are in Germany and there is a cafe at the top of the mountain that serves weissbier and bratwurst. Prior planning prevents piss poor performance, a friend Tom once told me.

I let the others do the driving and the trail finding, and woke up as we got to a trailhead. We started walking down a trail that wasn't really signed. I grew suspicious after 30 minutes of our on-the-right-trail-edness. We found a ray of sun shining throught the trees, and I decided to show off my orienteering savvy.

Stick a stick in the sand and mark the end of the shadow (Point 1). Wait 15-20 minutes. Mark the end of the new shadow (Point 2). Draw a line from Point 1 to Point 2, which shows you which direction east is. The sun travels east to west, and if you are positive that we you are still in the Northern Hemisphere, you have an unwieldy but effective compass.

So now we knew we were briskly walking away from the mountain we wanted to climb for a half hour or so. We came understand that the trail system was organized and marked with animal charicatures. We were on the Rabbit Trail. After following the Rabbit, we took a right onto the Beetle Trail. Left on the Fern Trail. The Fern Trail got us into meeting some runners who pointed and confused us more. We started down an unmarked side trail, and I'm thinking about the headlines, "Stupid American Tourists Found Frozen 200 Metres From Their Car".

The unmarked trail essentially brought us back to the car, where we hitched a ride on a bus to the proper trailhead. The real trail was a beautiful walk through autumn hardwoods, steeply climbing through the autumnal colour palate.

We emerged from the shaded woods into a deadwood forest. For miles and miles around, trees at this elevation were dead and white. We wondered about acid rain or fire, and then remembered reading about a beetle attack. The trail maintanence crew cut down snags close to the trail, so they wouldn't fall on unwary wanderers.

The mountaintop vegetation in autumnal beauty mixed reds and oranges of the shrubs, straw and browns of the grasses, and greens from the fir trees.


Near the top of Mt. Rachel sits this Haus, where hikers can refresh themselves with cakes and coffee, or beer and pretzels. We all agreed that plum cake and coffee was in order.

Plum cake: a wonder of European culinary culture. A delicate balance of sweet and tart without too much uneccesary sugar. On a hike, would you really rather eat an energy bar? Oh how I've missed you, plum cake.


The background of this photo is the Czeck Republic. Just more miles of dead forest. But is was very pretty dead forest.

Every little zit of a mountain in Germany has a cross at the peak. I think Ian was really happy about his plum cake and coffee in this picture.