Yesterday, we went on the most beautiful hike we’ve done so far this year: The Gertelbach waterfalls in the Black Forest. We didn’t want to go alone this time so we asked Mike’s brother Daniel if he wanted to tag along.
Together we drove to the Gertelbach Wasserfälle Wanderparkplatz, which took us a little bit over an hour. We started with our 6.5 miles hike around 10 am. There are two ways you can do this loop trail: Either you can head straight towards the waterfalls (what 99 % of all people do) or you can walk into the other direction and reach the waterfall at the end. If you know me and our hiking experiences, we would almost every time walk into the opposite direction. (Then you don’t have to let people, who are quicker than you, overtake.) This meant we would reach the waterfalls at the end, which is also a good motivation for the kids (and us) to keep on going 😉
At the beginning and a small stretch in the middle we hiked on wide paths (which isn’t that exciting for our kids) so I decided to change our route a little bit. But let me start at the beginning: Our first goal was to reach the Waldgasthaus Kohlbergwiese. This is a restaurant with a big playground outside. During Corona time they only serve food and drinks to go from Friday until Sunday (11am-5pm) but they had something on the menu for everyone of us and the kids had a lot of fun running around the playground.
After having an early lunch we went further to the Herta Hütte, which is a beautiful lookout over the Black Forest. Like I already said, I didn’t like the wide paths that much. So I spontaneously decided to change our route a bit and it was so much more exciting. It was a narrow path that lead us straight through the rocks. We even had to crawl (the kids could walk) under toppled trees – reminders of a storm that had passed through. What we didn’t know is that we also had to do some rock climbing at the end but with our two little mountain goats that was, quote Nate: “a piece of cake!” 🙂
We had originally planned to pass by a little chapel and also maybe go up to the Bärenstein (this one was blocked for decades and just opened up again a couple of weeks ago) but we couldn’t wait to see the waterfalls. So we took a little shortcut and went over sticks and stones towards the waterfalls. It rained so much in the last couple of days so that from time to time even the paths were flooded with water. This time we were really glad we took our hiking poles with us, that helped us not to slip.
The waterfalls itself were so impressive, we decided to have a little coffee break there. As you know me I love water so much, that I couldn’t resist to get in there with my feet. I had to feel for myself how cold the water really was… It was super refreshing, I can tell you that. 🙂 We walked along the waterfalls all the way until the car. It is such a unique place and even though it was a beautiful day to go on a hike it wasn’t too overcrowded. (I bet it is way worse on a Sunday) At around 4:30 pm we arrived back at our car.
