Mountain Traveler is a series about travelers in the mountains.

Michael Schuermann wrote this guest post on German mountains.  Known as Easy Hiker (@easyhiker101 on Twitter), he is a German-born journalist who started traveling at age seven but discovered hiking only in his late 40s.

Schuermann has lived and worked as a journalist in London for the BBC World Service in the early 1980s and now lives in Paris.  He has written a book, Paris Movie Walks, about his adopted home.

Königssee in Bavaria. Photo credit: Michael Schuermann.

Many people will know that there are mountains in Germany.

You, too, have probably seen their inhabitants: men in lederhosen who communicate through yodeling, drink a lot of beer and slap themselves merrily on their thighs at the merest hint of provocation.

Only some German mountains look like this copy. Photo credit: Michael Schuermann.

Yes: there can be no doubt that the Alps, while sublimely beautiful, are also a somewhat scary place. Not only because of the lederhosen but also because of the weather.

The atmospheric conditions in the Alps are notoriously fickle: you leave for a walk on a clear and lovely summer morning, and before you know it, it’s mid December. Once the clouds draw in, the temperatures up there can fall to near-freezing within minutes.

My website is subtitled Adventure for Beginners: in the Alps, you must always make sure that you don’t get more “adventure” than you bargained for.

Much safer to stick to the Mittelgebirge then, the mountain ranges with peaks between 500 and just over 1,000 meters.

The most popular range among the German Bijoux Mountains is the Black Forest.

The Black Forest is also the only German mountain range with an internationally famous gateau to its name and the one with the highest peaks: the Feldberg reaches a proud and near-alpine 1,493 metres, making it the most elevated spot anywhere on the continent between the Alps and the North Sea.

In hiking, however, it is not the height alone that matters. Some of the mountain trails take you up the ridge and keep you there until you reach your destination.

These tend to be the old trails that were laid out hundreds of years ago by people – mainly messengers and itinerant traders – for whom walking was simply a way of getting from A-Town to B-Hausen.

The Rennsteig on the ridge of the Thuringian Forest, for example, was at the time considered to be faster and safer than the low road down in the valley.

Newer trails, conversely, have generally been designed to provide modern man with a hiking experience and a sportive challenge.

The Rheinsteig, for example (possibly Germany’s number one hiking trail: castles and vineyards galore), never takes you up very high – its highest point is a measly 365 m – but the constant up and down can be quite exhausting for the average hiker. (It certainly got me out of breath.)

Beginners may be better advised to try out the rolling hills of the Teutoburg Forest, a two-hour railway journey to the North. (The trail is called the “Hermannshoehen”.)

And for those for whom even these rolling hills are too steep, there is always the neighboring Muensterland: flat as one of the locally popular potato pancakes (the German version of latkes) and offering moated castles galore if no vineyards.

But, in exchange and as compensation, the area has some of the best beers in Germany.

Prosit!

This is a Guest Post.