On the morning of July 23rd, 2021, after a great breakfast at the B&B where the owner’s sister told us all kinds of stories about her family of mountaineers (such as her grandfather celebrating his 80th birthday on the summit of Grossglockner with the whole family), we took the 9:30 bus from the centre of… Continue reading The Alpe-Adria trail – Days 1 to 3
The Alpe-Adria trail
I don’t remember how I first heard about the Alpe-Adria trail. Maybe it was a magazine article but it’s more likely that aimless surfing on the web led me to read about it. Right away, I knew I wanted to walk it. The idea of linking Austria (where my previous hiking experiences had left me… Continue reading The Alpe-Adria trail
A 10-km loop around Savins
Having exhausted most of the possibilities in the hiking guide devoted to our immediate local area and keen to try out new paths, we got out an old guide for the whole département of the Seine-et-Marne where we live. And so, on a sunny Sunday May morning, we found ourselves parking opposite the church on… Continue reading A 10-km loop around Savins
The Harz Witches’ Trail
For the last multi-day hike of 2020, before winter and a new lockdown (which would last much longer than we initially thought), I left Paris on October 23rd with my favourite travel and hiking companion, my wife Odile, to walk the Harz Witches’ Trail (the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg) in central Germany. With Halloween coming up, we felt… Continue reading The Harz Witches’ Trail
The Black Forest Westweg – Part Two – Hausach to Basel
The second half of the Westweg would turn out to be as spectacular as the first, taking in a number of remarkable spots as the trail passed over several of the highest summits in the Black Forest. The weather on this section varied as much as on the first half, with gloriously sunny days and… Continue reading The Black Forest Westweg – Part Two – Hausach to Basel
The Black Forest Mittelweg – Days 7 to 9
Day seven would be the longest of the trail, an exhausting 35.5-km hike from Furtwangen to Lenzkirch. I had a pretty good night’s sleep and set off at around 8:30. It had rained during the night, but there was an icy wind blowing and the forecast said it would be mostly dry until mid-afternoon, which… Continue reading The Black Forest Mittelweg – Days 7 to 9
Black Forest Mittelweg – Days 4 to 6
After setting off from the Hotel Hirsch with its gloomy Russians, I quickly found myself deep in the woods. Most of the morning was spent on a very narrow trail for hikers only through the very thick, beautiful and occasionally magical forest. The trail in fact followed the old border between Baden and Württemberg. This… Continue reading Black Forest Mittelweg – Days 4 to 6
The Black Forest Mittelweg – Days 1 to 3
On arriving at the station in Pforzheim, you first need to walk around 2.5 km across the town to the inn at Kupferhammer where the Westweg, Mittelweg and Ostweg all begin. Pforzheim isn’t the prettiest town in Germany, but once you leave the rather ugly town centre, the path to the trail head leads through… Continue reading The Black Forest Mittelweg – Days 1 to 3
The Black Forest Mittelweg
In the midst of these crazy times, after cancelling two long-distance hikes because of the pandemic, I’m finally setting off on another multi-day trail. The Paris region where I live in France is still on the German government’s list of risk areas, even though my village of just 200 people is 80 km out of… Continue reading The Black Forest Mittelweg
The Black Forest Westweg – Part One – Pforzheim to Hausach
The Black Forest in south-west Germany, just across the border from France, is criss-crossed by numerous hiking trails. Three major ones run north to south, the Westweg, the Mittelweg and the Ostweg. All three begin in Pforzheim and end, respectively, in Basel, Waldshut and Schaffhausen on the Rhine. The Westweg, with its 13 days of… Continue reading The Black Forest Westweg – Part One – Pforzheim to Hausach
Footsteps 