Hiking from Essen Kettwig to Kupferdreh

Just like every year, I planned a few weekend trips this year. One of them was for Bad Berleburg. In fact, I made a reservation for Bad Berleburg twice, first one being in January, in the middle of hard lockdown. And the second time would have been this weekend. This time, it first looked like it was going to be difficult, but then things got much better, to reach the point that it would have been possible to do the trip – only to find out that the holiday house that I reserved got water damages and couldn’t host people. So I had to cancel the trip. And since there was a friend of mine whose rich parents got an expensive holiday house in Italy where I was invited, I didn’t organise another one. So this weekend, there’s simply this hike and tomorrow I’ll go to the south of Italy by train (for close to 24h).

Download kml / gpx

Since the hikes that I organised recently were quite far away from Düsseldorf, I decided to organise one nearby. This trail was one of the first ones I created (it must have been from 2017), which I never offered, because it was explicitly marked “not promising” in my note. Looking at the trail once again, I couldn’t really understand what should be so not-promising, so I decided to propose it anyway.

Kettwig has two stations; Kettwig and Kettwig Stausee. They are fairly close to each other and when I think of Kettwig I don’t really do the distinction between them. And today I had put “Kettwig” for the starting point, while what I meant to say was Kettwig Stausee. Tim notified me in the morning and I quickly modified the description on my website and FB. I hope no one had to look for us at Kettwig in the end…

There’s this tunnel connecting Hösel (which is the last stop before Kettwig if you come from Düsseldorf) and Kettwig Stausee. It’s not particularly long, but the landscape somehow changes drastically before and after the tunnel – the Düsseldorf side is a vast cultivated field the protagonist of the “Catcher in the Rye” might well have imagined. The other side is a hilly forest kind of area with a beautiful view over the Rhine.

And this was extremely the case from the beginning at Kettwig Stausee. If you imagine Essen in the industrial Ruhr area, you wouldn’t believe there’s also such an untouched forest on its outskirts.

Concerning the weather, we had an extremely hot week until yesterday. I almost changed the trail to include the Ruhr for us to be able to swim, but then there was a temperature hole today, with a lot of clouds in the sky. This being said, it was almost too hot until yesterday, so maybe it’s good that that weather didn’t continue :).

This side of the Ruhr doesn’t have quite as many houses as the other side. We were mostly in the nature the whole day. It might also be difficult to make a city here because it was actually quite hilly.

We had a break at Heidhausen, which is probably part of Essen-Werden. There were a few restaurants nearby, but I’m not really sure if people went there. Probably from next time on, I’m going to try to make sure that there’s a proper place for a break. The lack of restaurants might have been actually also the reason that there were clearly less ladies this time, and also last few times.

We got more sun in later during the day. In this perfect temperature, it was like a dream to go through a perfect field like this one. Well, not to mention that I wasn’t perfectly sure if this was supposed to be a real path or not XD (it was at least marked as a path on Open Street Maps!).