Hiking from Heubing to Hagen!

And here we came back to Hagen. I’m very sure that you’ll get a lot of hits if you put “Hagen” in the search bar above. That’s so often that we came to this place. To be honest, this is not the most beautiful place in the world, but it offers a lot of hiking trails, and it’s not too far away from Düsseldorf. So I don’t particularly love this area, but I still appreciate its existence a lot.

Download kml / gpx

Compared to last week, the weather was significantly worse, but at least the rain stopped in the night. We didn’t see the sun, but it was a fresh cool weather after rain, which was perfect for a hike.

Today’s adventure started already in the morning: we were supposed to change trains in Schwelm, where according to the original schedule we would have had 9 min to change trains. But hey, this is Germany – the trains never arrive on time. Ours got a stressful 8 min delay (probably +30 seconds), so that we had to run through the train station to reach the S-Bahn. Probably we actually wouldn’t have made it, if those who were already on the train (those who came from Cologne and took this one earlier) hadn’t negotiated with the conductor. Anyway, we all made it.

After crossing this part of Hagen, Heubing, we started hiking. I thought Heubing was just a small place, but it took us quite some time to traverse the area. But then until the end of the day we hardly saw civilization. And compared to the length of today’s hike – in total around 17 km – it was still a short distance.

Hagen is just a city, but for me it has two distinct areas which offer quite different landscapes. There’s the South Eastern side of Hagen, e.g. Dahl, which clearly belongs to Sauerland, i.e. it goes up and down a lot, but somehow the area is not quite beautiful. Then there’s also the Western side of the city, which is the beginning of Bergisches Land, which is not quite hilly, but the trees are greener and somewhat richer. Today, we were on the Western side.

It was a quite large group today. What were they looking forward to? At least I was glad that I could offer today’s walk and not something like Duisburg or so. Duisburg is by the way coming up some time in the near future, although it makes sense the most when it’s really nasty outside (i.e. soon).

It wasn’t such a complicated trail today, but for some reason I was going wrong everywhere. It’s still important to keep in mind that it didn’t really follow any known path. Hagen is just like this – it’s wild everywhere and everywhere it’s good.

We had a break at Hennewiese, which is a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. It’s so far away from any other restaurants whatsoever that we essentially have to come to this place. But the staff there are kind of nice (“kind of nice” is probably the right way to put it, because they are not always straightforwardly super nice).

I have to say I’m amazed to see that after so many sessions around this area, I still got such a great trail today, with very little overlapping with what we’ve already had before.

I was thinking about offering this hike some time in winter, to connect it with the Christmas market of Hagen, which is actually really beautiful, especially compared with what Hagen otherwise is like. This year, however, it’s rather unlikely that there’d be Christmas markets in Germany, so we did it today and still enjoyed ice creams at the end of the hike :).