Hiking around Arnsberg

I was staying at my friend’s place at Möhnesee over the weekend, which made me get the idea of organising two hikes in a row in the Sauerland, which is one of the most named areas in NRW (along with the Eiffel and the Bergisches Land). Despite my initial expectations, there was unfortunately a thunderstorm announced, which made it today probably quite unattractive.

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When we arrived there at Arnsberg, which was our starting point, there were 6 people without me, but 3 of them wanted to wait for their friends who missed a train at Dortmund, and decided to stay there. So in total, with me we were 4 people hiking today, just like the very first hike I organised back in 2017.

If you look at the trail above, you might get the impression that there’s an impossible slope at the very beginning. Just as always with Komoot, it was rather a problem of representation, since the path was much more winding than Komoot knew, and while we were indeed going up quite a height there was nothing particularly complicated there.

Compared to other areas in the Sauerland, this area was obviously less affected by the dryness of the recent years. The forests were mostly fully covered by trees and hardly anywhere there were barren areas.

There was indeed a storm in the evening yesterday. The entire forest was quite wet and the air was fairly moist. It was not a super friendly environment, but compared to the fact that there could have been a storm it was a really good weather.

At the beginning we were going through a quite large forest. But then fields and forests appeared uninterrupted over the trail until the end of the day today.

We had a break at Wennigloh, which is apparently having large action against the wind farm. I never really understood what’s exactly going on, but apparently even though people think it’s important to have wind farms in Germany, no one wants to have it at their place. And well, I don’t really understand why.

Just like in every German village, there was a church in the middle of the city, where we had a break.

I have to say it was really not bad to have such a small group today. In the end, I could keep talking with the same people, which is something I don’t particularly like to do in large groups.

We had rather narrow paths on the way back to Arnsberg. It might have been difficult to follow the trail in a large group.

When we essentially reached Arnsberg, I realised that it was not quite as easy to reach the train station as it might seem on the map above. Actually we still had to cross the old city of Arnsberg, which lies on top of a hill. You can circumvent it by going along the river, but then it becomes much longer. I was covered with sweat after this last part. But it was an intriguing medieval path you enjoy discovering, so I’m glad that we took it in the end.