Hiking around Zerkall!

First there was this super gloomy weather forecast.

Download kml / gpx

Actually right now almost everyday is gloomy, and it was just only natural to believe that it was going to be the same for Sunday. The thing is, however, it was not really gloomy in the end. As we were waiting for the train at Düsseldorf Central, the sky was actually very blue. It was kind of very promising.

I was also very glad that it was looking very promising. This hike around Zerkall is something that follows a hike that we did a few years ago, and while we go to the lake Rur very often, we barely know the area nearby, essentially along the train line that connects Düren and the lake. Even though the weather was just horrible last time, Bogdan and I had very good memories of that hike, so I wanted to relive the great experience again.

Our train from Düsseldorf to Düren was of course delayed, but this time I allocated enough time for changing trains in Düren this time, essentially because there’s a nice café at the train station of Düren, so it wouldn’t be painful anyway even if the train arrives punctually.

Probably because of the weather forecast, it was a relatively small group today – we were less than 10 people when we started. This train station of Zerkall was impressively empty. There’s also only on track and frankly if you don’t know there’s a train station there, you might simply miss it.

There’s this massive forest in the Eifel, that glows green in the summer, and right now in the autumn, it becomes vividly yellow. There are also some red spots in the mountain as well, giving a beautiful palette of colors to the mountains. It was a huge difference to last week’s hike in this regard.

There are these huge rocks around this area. I don’t quite understand how they came about, but they offer popular locations for climbers here. Sometimes you have to be a bit careful when you are going underneath, because some small rocks coming from climbers might fall on you.

When we reached the highest point on this side, we had a great view over the river Rur. It was a little bit unfortunate that the weather got a bit bad in that moment – a little bit rainy and windy. Well “bad” is maybe an overstatement, because it was just only a little bit. Also it stopped very quickly.

We had to go down the hill from that point to the Rur. This part was very unofficial and I wasn’t sure if the path existed, but it turned out to be kind of okay – it was just a little bit difficult because the path was a bit muddy.

I was initially thinking about having a break at Obermaubach, which would have been the other side of the river, but it turned out that there was a good restaurant without crossing the river. I had my lunch outside first (very windy), and joined all the others in the restaurant. It was so cozy inside that we stayed there for around an hour.

Some people joined while we were having a break there. Some caught up, there was one who simply got off this morning at Obermaubach because she missed our train and came with the one later.

The way back to Zerkall was a mixture of various things. Of course there were forests and fields, in addition to the river along which we were hiking. There was also this one bridge which was ultra slippery. Well, today the weather was also somewhat weird as we could see the beautiful sky almost all the time, but then there were showers sporadically, while the sky was blue.

The highlight of today’s hike was this tower, from which we could see the entire surrounding area. It was so extremely windy that I thought I was going to lose my phone while taking a beautiful panorama photo from there.

When we arrived at Zerkall, we had around 45 min to the next train. This train station, however, has pretty much nothing to offer. We didn’t have much hope in that moment, but then there was one train coming from the opposite direction, so we took it to go to the next station, Nideggen, where we went to an Italian restaurant to have a drink, and then we took a train back to Düren, then to Düsseldorf. It was a kind of weird action all over 😀