![]() In fact, with a 400-year history of Austrian domination, a resentment of the Prussian mentality and a special appreciation for a few things French, at least some in the Black Forest - or Schwarzwald, in German - considered theirs a land apart. To me, "Black Forest" had conjured up little more than Black Forest ham, Black Forest cake and a dark, dense breeding ground for mystery.īut actually, I was tramping along light-dappled paths among clusters of tall, flaring pines and Christmas-tree spruces, through part of a 3,000-square-mile area that saw itself removed from the rest of Germany. Until these moments, I had been among the uninitiated. There were, to be sure, certain designated landmarks - a tiny, rock-encircled pool described as the source of the Danube, a miniature, 700-year-old chapel. And, as I set off along a gentler - and more typical - trail, I now allowed myself to look around. I began to feel that I just might survive after all. Making it to the top of the trail without incident was a great confidence-booster. "One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other," I kept repeating to myself, barely daring to stop to appreciate one of the walk's more memorable sights. (Later, I would learn that some walkers, to avoid this climb within the first minutes of their first day, began their treks in other towns.)Īs I toiled past the series of dashing white falls tumbling over moss-covered rocks, I remembered the Chinese saying about the thousand-mile journey beginning with a single step. Leading out of Triberg, a trail took me along the edge of Triberg Falls - Germany's highest waterfall at 338 feet - over the route's steepest continuous grade. The initial segment of my journey was challenging, as challenging as the way would ever get. Also during the trek, I would clamber over rocks, pad over pine needles and climb a television-tower-topped hill, lunching in wayside inns, sleeping in atmospheric hostelries and chatting with local characters. I would reach these towns and hamlets by hiking through aromatic pine stands, across undulating meadows, past rough-hewn farmhouses and a myriad of miniature shrines and chapels. Margen, Titisee-Neustadt, Bonndorf and Friedenweiler. "But of course," he was saying, as if talking about a trip to the mailbox, "you'll probably get lost a couple of times and have to walk two or three extra miles." The mere thought was killing.Īnd so, unlike the cowboy who never had heard a discouraging word, I set off the following morning on my five-day, 65-mile itinerary to Neueck, St. Now Herr Blum was smilingly telling me that no one yet had died along the way. Would walking and running on a treadmill in a Manhattan gym be sufficient preparation for 15 miles a day outdoors? Especially when an athletic cousin, 10 years my junior, had exclaimed skeptically, "Last summer, I walked for just six miles out West and was pooped. Being handed, on the spot, a topographical map and a paperwork route guide in German - neither of which I could read - was another.īesides, I well knew that, when it came to outdoor activities, the European and American concepts of "easy" were two entirely different notions. ![]() on the trail of the cuckoo clock traders" - allegedly "quite safe, even for a woman walking alone" - was one thing. Ensconced in a New York apartment and reading a romantic-sounding brochure about "wunderhiking. As the steward of a local walking program that transports hikers' luggage from hotel to hotel while the travelers themselves tramp relatively unencumbered, he was seeking to convince me that I would have no problems en route.īut I was not mollified. The dapper proprietor of my hotel in Triberg - in the southwestern corner of Germany's Black Forest - was really trying to be reassuring. Herr Claus Blum was scaring me out of my wits.
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