For our visit to Germany my niece and I had planned to attempt a 100 km ( ~62 miles) continuous walk. Unfortunately illness interfered with our plans. By the time both of us where in shape again for such an attempt we were out of time. So we settled on a simple day hike. My niece suggested the Viadukt Wanderweg around Altenbeken, one of her favorites. This hike is about 30 km (19 miles) and has an elevation gain of around 640 m (2100 ft). The weather forecast said 100 % rain, 0 h sunshine, but we only had that one date available and we were determined to do a hike together. So we left home around 8 am in the dark, stopped at a bakery for some fresh bread rolls for the hike and drove to the trail head. It was raining lightly and with the forecast predicting a wet day we donned our full rain gear and applied the backpack’s rain covers.
As we were leaving the town we crossed under the first Viadukt (rail road bridge) and climbed up into the forest. It stopped raining, but there was a very dense fog. This was fun for Srisuda and me since we are used to hike in the super dry conditions of southern California, not so much for my niece who lives in this stuff. The trail traverses forest (mostly forest roads), crosses meadows and goes along edges of farm fields. We enjoyed the atmosphere the fog provided and soon reached the second Viadukt view point. Only in the conditions we barely could make out the shape of the bridge and had to walk a little closer to see the full shape, but even then it was just a faint outline in the fog. At one point we came up a hill through some fields when suddenly this giant tower-like shape appeared out of the fog in front of us. It took us a moment to realize this was no ordinary tower, but the base of one of those giant wind turbines that are placed all over the surrounding hills.
At the end of the hike we got treated to a great view of the illuminated Viadukt at the town’s edge. We made it back to the car just in time not to have to use our head lamps, a bit of a feat in these parts where this time of year the daylight last less than 8 h. Just 10 minutes before reaching the car it started to rain fairly heavily, we had been lucky all day to only have brief periods of drizzle/light rain.
Overall a great “bad weather” hike. When we announced our plans and when we told others about our hike afterwards we almost unanimously got the response: “Why would you do this in this weather?” I guess it’s hard for someone living in these wet/dark conditions to understand that one can miss rain and fog.
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