Malerweg Day 4 - Rathen to Altendorf

I returned to Rathen on Wednesday June 4 to hike my last three stages of the Malerweg.

From Rathen, I followed the trail along the Gruenbach...

...through the Amsel Grund, past the Rathewalder Muehle... 

Can you spot the mill?

...and through the small town Rathewald.

Garden flowers in Rathewald

The route eventually led me to the top of the Hockstein, with a narrow valley separating me from the Hohnstein castle one plateau to the east.

I descended to the valley through the Wolfsschlucht ("Wolf's Gorge"), which involved walking into a hole in the rocks and tromping down several hundred steep steps. This slot was one of the highlights of the entire Malerweg.

At last, the end in sight...

If you were to hike in the opposite direction, you'd start by walking into a hole in the rocks on this end too:

It wasn't long before I was heading up to Hohnstein. The castle likely dates to the 13th c., with the first written documentation dating to the first half of the 14th c. 

From 1933-34, the Nazi party used Hohnstein as a concentration camp; from 1935-39, they used it as a youth hostel for the Hitler Jugend; and during WW2, it served as a prison camp.

I didn't know any of that when I explored the town and castle. Nor did I know that the town of Hohnstein had the strongest AfD turnout in all of Germany in the 2025 federal election. The far right party received 57.4% of Hohnstein's votes. 

Tower from the outside...

Tower from the inside...

Tower view: Lilienstein

Getting out of town proved challenging due to a large construction project, but I got back on track and back to stairs and rocks after a generous detour.

Unsurprisingly, the bark beetle has made it to the Saechsische Schweiz. While foresters catch up on slowing the infestation by clearing out dead and dying trees, hikers are advised to watch out for falling branches.

Scourge

I stayed on the Malerweg until it passed through Goßdorf-Kohlmuehle, site of a now-defunct linoleum factory. The factory was purchased for next to nothing in 2016, but toxic waste has prevented renovations. 

The Bahnhofshotel has seen better days...

...as has the factory.

My accommodation for the night was in Altendorf. Somehow in my route planning, I created a short cut that sent me over a hill instead of around it, chopping off about a mile the Malerweg. Oh well.

Ta da! 13 miles of the day's 18 total

In need of something to do before dinner, I decided to hike the nearby Panoramaweg to the Schlossberg above Bad Schandau.  

My route took me past a Schiller monument...

...to some fake ruins on the Schlossberg. There are very ruined ruins somewhere on the site--so well ruined that there's nothing left to see--but in the 1880s, fake ruins were added to attract tourists. 

Affenstein--a destination for the following day

Ta da! So close to Bad Schandau, I could have
taken a train back to Dresden for the night

Malerweg Day 3, part 2 - Rathen to Liebethaler Grund

Pumped with adrenaline after our long-coveted early morning Kaiserkrone ascent, we continued after breakfast to Schmilka. The fog had cleared, and this time we could see the Zirkelstein just a hop, skip, and jump away from the road.

In Schmilka, S took a train back to Dresden and work. I rode with him as far as Rathen, where I disembarked and caught a ferry across the river to hike up to the Bastei ("bastion")--probably the most famous and certainly the most touristisch section of the Malerweg--and then on to Liebethaler Grund.

Can you see all the tourists?

There, that's easier...

Signage along the Malerweg alerts hikers that Friedrich and other artists were inspired here:

https://www.saechsische-schweiz.de/malerweg/wissenswertes/kunst/caspar-david-friedrich

I zipped through the Bastei a little impatiently, because I'm curmudgeonly and the crowds were large--even on a Monday--and crowds do annoying things like walking four abreast and walking off-trail next to signs that say "Stay on the trails." Zip zip zip. 

Beyond the Bastei, the trail continued through the woods and then down, down, down to Stadt Wehlen...

No photos of the down parts, so here's some flat...

Looking east toward Bohemia 

After lunch in the Stadt Wehlen Marktplatz, I headed up the hill to the Wehlen Burgruine. The ruins are a restoration in progress...

The trail eventually took me into the Uttewalder Grund, a lush and rocky gorge (Grund being the general term to describe several such canyons in the Saechsische Schweiz). As in other places along the Malerweg, signage alerted me that Friedrich had passed this way:

Felsentor im Uttewalder Grund

Normally this hangs in Essen's Museum Folkwang, but we saw it in New York.

I didn't realize how place-specific this sepia-over-pencil painting was until I turned a corner on the trail and found myself looking straight at the real thing: 

The trail through the arch was covered with a few inches of mud, and two other hikers were picking their way through the arch from the other direction, but I didn't have the guts to ask them to pause and pose for a photo solely so I could recreate Friedrich's painting.

Another arch awaited in a boulder deposit further down the trail: 

Toward the end of the day, after emerging twice from gorges up into fields, I passed a sculpture marking the intersection of 51^oN latitude and 14^oE longitude. 

Signage noted that the sculptural marker doesn't quite align with where GPS locates the confluence, which likewise doesn't quite align with where previous geodetic systems located it. That the systems span 122 years and are all within a few hundred meters of one another--on a planet that's 12.756 million meters in diameter--is remarkable.

The photograph below doesn't do the pointilistic appearance of the fields justice:

I passed through the town Lohmen, where Moravian stars were hanging between two of the buildings. Moravian stars originated about 180 years ago as a geometry lesson for boys at a Moravian boarding school in the Saxon town Niesky, about 50 miles NE of Dresden. An alum grew up to become a bookseller, and began making and selling the stars through his shop; in the 1880s, his son founded a star factory in nearby Herrnhut, and they've been in continuous production ever since.     

I thought the route would continue through town to the Liebethaler Grund bus stop, not yet having learned that "Grund" meant a gorge would be involved. Partway through town, the route ducked behind some buildings and descended steeply down a cobblestone road to the Wesenitz river, a tributary of the Elbe.

The cobblestones continued for several miles. The river was to my left, and a steep cliff wall was to my right, with surprisingly infrequent exit options back up to town. Few people were around on that Monday afternoon, which eventually had me thinking about ways a hiker might perish without witnesses, and about how long it might take for anyone to happen past to find the body. Such thoughts are one of the reasons S and I share the same Komoot account, and why I try to notify him when I go off-trail: it makes it easier for him to know where to look for me if I fail to come home. (Theoretically only, at least so far. In general, I feel much safer hiking alone in Germany than in the U.S., thanks largely to the higher population density, outside exercise ethos, and relative unavailability of guns and bullets.)

These macabre ruminations were suddenly interrupted by a giant homage to Richard Wagner, depicting the composer as a knight of the Holy Grail, and installed--no surprise--in 1932-33, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death, when the NSDAP was embracing Wagner's music as emblematic of their vision for a new Germany.

Blech

From the Wagner Denkmal, it was a little less than a mile to the bus stop and back to the unexpectedly welcome bustle of big-city civilization.

Ta da! 11.3 miles of the day's 22.5 mile total