Panorama private hike through the Black Forest with a Local

Overview

A three-hour panorama walk in the Black Forest with a local guide, on the ridges and open slopes where the view opens out rather than in the dense plantation below. Short, unhurried, and considerably more interesting than a forest walk sounds, because almost nothing you are looking at is natural.

Parts of Amsterdam are standing on this forest

The trade was called Holländerflösserei — Dutch rafting — and it worked like this. Fir and spruce trunks of exceptional size, up to thirty metres long and still forty centimetres thick at the narrow end, were felled here, lashed into rafts and floated out through the river system: down the Neckar, Main and Moselle into the Rhine, and on to the Netherlands.

There they were used for shipbuilding and, more consequentially, driven into the ground as foundation piles. Whole districts of Amsterdam rest on millions of piles rafted downstream over the centuries. The forest was exported, and a great deal of it is now underground in another country.

What grew back was replanted, largely as spruce, which is why the woodland reads as dark, even-aged and orderly. The name refers to a canopy that was substantially manufactured.

A bare summit that people made

The high ground has open tops, and the reason is not altitude. Clearance for cattle grazing began around a thousand years ago and kept the summits treeless. The highest point in the range reaches just under fifteen hundred metres — the highest in Germany outside the Alps and Bavaria — and its bareness is an agricultural decision that outlived the agriculture.

And a river that starts here

Two streams rising in these hills, the Breg and the Brigach, join further east to become the Danube. The more distant of the two sources is the true head of a river that runs on for well over two thousand kilometres to the Black Sea. It is a modest spring in a wood, and everything downstream of it is consequence.

Practical shape

Three hours at a walking pace, on marked paths with some ascent and uneven going in places. Weather here is wetter and cooler than the surrounding lowlands and changes quickly, and mist on the ridges can close the panorama entirely — which is worth knowing when choosing a day. Boots or shoes with grip, a waterproof layer and water are the whole kit list.