After our RheinSteig walks, we headed East to the Harz – a mid-range mountain area, wooded – and once a major element in the Iron Curtain that devide Eastern Germany – the communist German Democratic Republic – DDR – and Western Germany – the capitalistic German Federal Republic – BDR.
We stayed at the camping site of Hohegeisz – a village on the edge of Western Germany: some backyards literally a few feet away from the former boundary.
Our first walk was into the woordland to the West of the village – to a location named “Nullpunkt”: Point Zero. From what: probably the starting point of trigoniometric measurements? but that is defeated by it’s loxcation: in the midst of mountains. Or a location from where logging was started?
The second day, we drove a little North to start a walk up the Brocken mountgain, the highest peak in the area, and now a popular destination for walks – or a train ride using the narrow gauge railway that leads to the summit – here the former espionage buildings now house a meuseum.
Our third day we joined a tour in the former boundary area; a no-go area for DDR citizens; our guides were a former GDB customs guy, and the major of a former DDR village. Part of that journey was a ride with the Harzer Schmallspur Bahn – the narrow gauge railway kept alive because of it’s value for the local people.
No maps or tracks for these walks – I lost the tracking data and I don’t have maps to reconstruct them – but the images are available.