Hiking from Wuppertal to Schaberg!

It’s summer, yes it’s summer!

When I created today’s trail a few weeks ago, I wasn’t really sure if we’d ever do it. This is because when we hiked from Schaberg to Wuppertal 2 years ago, I got the impression that we were going the same way all the time, probably because it was a massive forest all the time. Today’s one looked exactly the same, but I simply kept it just in case. I don’t know why I decided to put this particular for this week.

Well, then the summer came, the one which is very much like last year (at least for this week), and as it turned out, this trail was the perfect one: we could avoid the huge heatwave in this massive forest. Whether they knew it or not, there were a lot of people joining this time.

In strong contrast to the Ruhr area, it is not particularly important to pay attention to bikes around Wuppertal. Yet, there are a few bikeways that I mistakenly chose some time in the past for the hike. These are the former railway lines, where the rails were removed and it is restructured for bikes. And quite obviously, these paths have a very smooth form and therefore it is easy to avoid them. Today, there was one going almost along the direction that we were going, and some people were almost entering the area. They’d have seen a catastrophe if they had continued that way, with all the E-bikers who are often not quite used to cycling but cycle with a mind boggling speed (for their standards, of course).

The difficulty of hiking paths in the Wuppertal area is somewhere between Hagen and Essen: it is not as complicated as in Hagen, but has more wilderness than Essen. And therefore it was not always straightforward for some people, although of course we managed it pretty well anyway.

We were lucky that we had a break in the right place for this large number of people: an open café along the Wupper, which is a narrow river which ran along today’s hiking path, even though we didn’t see it until the break. Since this area is not industrialised (anymore), the Wupper is accordingly also quite clean, contrary to the Rhine.

The remaining distance was not very large, but probably due to the heat (there was less shadow) and up and down, a bit unexpectedly. Nevertheless, most of the people stayed at the Müngsten bridge, which was also a highlight of today’s hike, which is a nice rather touristic area with a nice riverside. Pity that I didn’t announce this aspect, because we could have swum in this great weather 🙂