Hiking around Hagen Wehringhausen

Somehow it does not really give the summer feeling in Germany this year yet, but it’s already time to think about going a little bit farther away, to explore more wild areas. That was what I was vaguely thinking when Hilal put this event around Hagen Wehringhausen. Ok it’s just a little bit wilder than Wuppertal, but it goes towards the Sauerland. So why not.

https://www.komoot.com/de-de/tour/1558539751?share_token=azgxdscD1zJfhKM3wdGSE45JhVlF5hP1CcadbtxTu551MEeCNb&ref=wtd

There’s this dilemma when you go to Hagen Wehringhausen from Düsseldorf: There’s the S8 that goes there directly, but it takes like forever from Düsseldorf central. Alternatively, you can also take an RE4 and change at Wuppertal or Schwelm, but then there are only a few minutes to change, and RE4 is not quite the most reliable line (hey which line is ever reliable in Germany?). I decided to take the risk, also partly because I wanted to charge my phone, even though for the group I said we would take the S8. Brilliant idea.

My bet paid off: all trains were punctual enough, and we could all safely arrive in Hagen Wehringhausen. Miracle happened.

As Wehringhausen is only a few hundred meters away from Hagen Central, I tend to avoid this station, but it is also true that it is very close to the hills. It’s funny to see all the houses along the steep roads even though they are in Germany, but it’s sort of normal here.

It’s almost June, but the weather is still somewhat unstable. Today, fortunately it was quite sunny, but the ground was partially extremely muddy.

Maybe because of the weather, there were quite some people today. Somehow some people started hiking earlier, and some later, so that it was never properly one group in the whole hike.

Hagen lies in the Sauerland, which tends to be quite wild, compared to places like Wuppertal or Eifel. Since Hagen-Wehringhausen lies on the side of Wuppertal, I had expected a somewhat mild hike, but it was a lot more like the Sauerland landscape. Some parts were actually even super wild. That’s a bit the danger of Sauerland: when it’s wild, it often becomes super wild, not like in the Eifel, where things stay relatively mild.

But today’s track was extremely green. That’s not always the case in the Sauerland. We were surrounded by massive forests.

We had a break at the half point, where there was practically nothing. We simply sat on a wood.

There was a huge discussion over where to have an ice cream from the beginning of the day. There is actually a nice ice cream parlor near Wehringhausen where we go whenever we have a hike around that area. It turned out that it was a Greek place, but still I liked their ice cream and the area in front of the shop. We stayed there for quite some time because we wanted to take an RE4 from Hagen central and not the nightmare train RE13.