Maximiliansweg: Introductory

Catching up with blog backlog!

In July, our friend Leslie arrived in Steinebach, and after a couple of days to recover from jetlag and do the requisite pre-hike hike to Andechs...

Pilgrimage to pork knuckle

...we hopped on the S8 and then a regional train--all courtesy of the 9-Euro/month Deutsche Bahn ticket (thanks again, German government, for subsidizing hundreds of miles of point-to-point hiking this summer!)--and arrived in Brannenburg, ready to take on a 7-day, 85-mile hike to Berchtesgaden, with a leisurely bonus 8th day at the end to be tourists.

Our route was based on the last several stages of the Maximiliansweg, a hiking route created in 1991 by the Deutscher Alpenverein (DAV). The route was inspired by a 5-week trip that King Maximilian II of Bayern took in 1858 from Lindau to Berchtesgaden. I figured if Maximilian could hike the route with his entourage and without any of the snazzy lightweight hiking gear we use nowadays, how challenging could it be? One website said he hiked it ("a path that was first walked by a king"--apparently he blazed the trail himself); others said he traveled by carriage and horseback and occasionally on foot. There were, actually, not a whole lot of details available on the interwebs about Maximilian's actual route, but the DAV trail it had its own purple MAX symbol in Komoot, and there were enough we'll-tote-your-luggage-while-you-walk-in-a-king's-footsteps companies advertising tours, that I figured it couldn't be too strenuous.

It turned out that having trail symbol on Komoot doesn't mean people know much about the trail. The trail had no blazes, and no identifiable trail symbol (like, e.g., the Jakobsweg has, with its radiating sun-like scallop shell, or the Querweg, with its half white/half red diamond on a yellow field). Signage was sparse on the days when we strictly followed the trail. We saw two plain metal Maximiliansweg signs on our first day, and multiple mentions of the Maximilian horse trail on signposts on our penultimate day, but otherwise little evidence that the trail was a named thing. Talking to folks in villages and en route, we found not a single person who had heard of the Maximiliansweg. So we take as apocryphal the suggestion that Maximilian hiked/carriaged/horsebacked his way across the route named after him, and suspect the DAV put together an approximate route based mostly on connecting the snazziest peaks. This also made it easier for us to detour off-route starting on Day 3, for reasons that will become apparent in the next few blog posts.

The route we ultimately hiked is this, which includes good stretches of the official DAV Maximiliansweg plus some acrophobe-approved alternate routes: