Summit of the St.Muffert

Diemelsee-Heringhausen (51.371829 | 8.729665)

A new view of things

Rocky mountain peak overgrown with deciduous forest and moss with a view of Diemelsee.

At the foot of the St.Muffert cliff. Before we scramble up, I imagine there's a cable car. The kind with little gondolas you see in theme parks. From the banks of the Diemel reservoir up to the summit. With a parking lot and snack bar at the bottom and a panorama café at the top. Sure, you would have had to cut a path through the beautiful forest along the ropes. But you could have reached the top in three minutes and without breaking a sweat. Does that sound tempting? My little fantasy has a real core, the plan for a cable car really did exist once. Thank goodness it was scrapped. It wasn't just the deforestation that would have been an outrage. The air travelers would also have been deprived of the pleasure of a hike full of discoveries. The GeoPark guide Gerd Rosenkranz promises to reveal the secret of how the Sauerland was actually formed at the summit.

The path leads through a sparse forest with beeches, oaks, here and there an ash and a hornbeam. "This is what a healthy stand looks like," says Gerd, "and it will look like this again in many areas of the Sauerland once the spruce trees have gone because they can't cope with the increasing drought in summer." We cross several small springs with lush green strips of wild garlic growing along their course. Where the slope becomes steeper, the scenery changes immediately. The trees are smaller, more huddled, with branches in crazy twists. They hold their ground on uncertain terrain, but it is only enough for a life with modest aspirations.

The roots of an oak have clawed their way directly into the almost vertical slate. They find even the smallest crevices, so-called faults, and push their way in, always looking for support and water. Who is holding whom here? "The rock holds the tree," says Gerd, "but the roots also hold the stone." Sounds like a fair deal. We reach a place where the slate is almost bare. Another new picture. The roots of young trees that want to establish themselves here are simply shaved off by the sharp-edged slabs of stone that slide down over the course of the year. No chance of growing old here.

After just under an hour, we reach the summit, the actual soul place. Previously, the water of the Diemelsee only briefly flashed bluish through the foliage, but now we can see it in its full, multi-armed form, fed by the two tributaries Diemel and Itter. The summit cross touches me in its naturalness, consisting only of two rough tree trunks, meagre strength, just like the stony ground on which it was erected. Near it, we look for a safe place to rest on the steep slope down to the riverbank, not unlike the scattered oaks, whose perseverance under extreme conditions has been embodied in sinuous shapes. The view sweeps over the hills and mountains below us. Sometimes covered by forest, sometimes as meadow slopes. A puzzle of shades of green. I used to think that the "thousand mountains" of the Sauerland were formed when the continental plates collided ages ago, causing mountains to fold up. Yes and no, says Gerd. "Over millions of years, wind and weather leveled out the mountains again. A kind of plateau was created." And all those mountains? Gerd points down to the course of the Diemel: "Rivers and streams, that's what they were. They say that every drop wears away the stone." The water as a sculptor has washed under, washed away, eaten into and cut deep and wide notches into the plain. The mountains are therefore only what the erosive force of the water has left standing. With consolation, the Sauerland could also be called the "land of a thousand valleys".

We sit under the summit cross for a long time. Becoming quieter. I review our hike, along the life cycles of wild garlic and trees; the walk through the ages of the earth; the slow approach to the magnificent view. A feeling of awe sets in. About how the natural forces of creation, preservation and destruction have wonderfully intertwined over millions of years; how chaos and order perform an endless dance together, never finding balance and soon losing it again; how, in the long run, all this coming and going has its incomprehensible rightness.

And then, in view of what I have just experienced, the thought occurs to me of what I would have missed out on - for three minutes of vertigo in a cable car.

Author: Michael Gleich