Malerweg Day 2 - Koenigstein to Reinhardtsdorf-Schöna

S and I headed back to Koenigstein on Sunday to resume hiking, this time heading east/counterclockwise on the Malerweg. Our destination for the evening was the Panoramahotel Wolfsberg on a hill outside of Reinhardtsdorf-Schöna, via multiple small plateaus en route. 

Koenigstein

The first plateau was Quirl:

Clay chicken for scale

S for scale

Atop Quirl, we practiced for the Kaiserkrone.

We headed down from Quirl on a cobblestone path. Did these stones make tourist travel by horse or coach easier in the 18th and 19th centuries?

Next plateaus: Pfaffenstein and Junggeselle.

What goes up...

...must come down...

The next plateaus were Goerisch and Papststein.

There were a lotta stairs...

We paused atop Papststein for a tasty vegetarian lunch.

Carrot soup

The Saechsische Schweiz is a popular destination for climbers.

We headed down, down, down from Papststein...

...to open fields...

...and Kleinhennersdorf, where we veered off-trail to cut through the village, where our kleine Henne felt right at home.

Can you see Carly?

Frog crossing

Street art

We hiked up yet another hill outside of Krippen, where the Malerweg crossed the Caspar-David-Friedrich-Weg. A sign pointed toward the spot that supposedly inspired Friedrich to paint Zwei Männer in Betrachtung des Mondes and Mann und Frau in Betrachtung des Mondes, but we were wiped out and didn't want to make the detour.

In Reinhardtsdorf-Schöna, we stopped inside a lovely truffle that was decorated in Bauernbarock ("peasant baroque") style. The church was founded ca. 1368 and expanded in the 1520s and 1670s.

From the church, we headed out of town, into the fields, and up a hill to our hotel, leaving the Malerweg behind us to follow the Caspar-David-Friedrich-Weg. We passed a snack hut on the way, and declined to stop for DDR-style soft serve--clearly more popular in Saxony than Italian gelato is. We meant to try it at some point, but left Saxony before we had a chance.

Getting close...

Friedrichesque panorama

A rain storm blew over our hotel in the evening--just what we needed for our hike up the Kaiserkrone the following day.

Ta da! 13.6 miles, 3200 ft elevation gain

Malerweg Day 1 - Koenigstein to Pirna

Time to shift to chronological order...

I arrived in Dresden on Friday, and S and I started hiking the Malerweg on Saturday. There's no better way to reset one's circadian clock than to hike for hours on a sunny day.

Our original plan was to start in Pirna and stay overnight in Koenigstein, but it was a holiday weekend, and we couldn't find a hotel room in advance. Because I assumed I'd be jetlagged, we decided to start in Koenigstein and hike clockwise to Pirna, so that by the time we were tuckered out from the hike, we'd have a shorter train ride back to Dresden. Our friend J, leader of the research exchange program in Dresden, joined us for the first eight miles between Koenigstein and Stadt Wehlen.

Koenigstein is the name of both a town on the Elbe and a Medieval fortress (with Renaissance and Baroque expansions) located on a plateau above the town.

From the train station, we headed uphill... 

...through woods and past interesting rock formations...

...until we reached the patrol trail below the fortress. Signage indicated that storming the fortress walls would NOT BE TOLERATED.

The views from the patrol trail were expansive. The table mountain on the left in the photo below is Lilienstein; we had multiple views of it throughout the day. 

Because we were below the fortress, we only occasionally had good views of it. We had decided in advance to skip visiting the fortress itself, since we didn't have the time to warrant the admission price.

After hiking halfway around the fortress, we descended from the plateau to the fields below.

Even with binoculars, we we too far away from these huge birds to tell if they were herons or storks. 

Mustard!

The trail took us up another table, Rauenstein, where we encountered the first of what would ultimately be thousands of built-in steps leading up and down the Malerweg.

My camera still sucks at showing UP vs. flat...

Carly came out for lunch atop Rauenstein

Post-lunch steps. One of the few photos that captures the UP-ness

Wanderers

Malerweg blazes are marked with an M

J on a relatively flat descent between Rauenstein and Stadt Wehlen

J cut off in Stadt Wehlen to catch a train back to Dresden. S and I still had another 6.7 miles to go. The first direction was, of course, up. Note the cobblestones in the photo; they can be found in places along the entire Malerweg. Since the Elbsandsteingebirge have been a tourist attraction since at least the 18th century, we wondered how long ago the cobblestones had been put in place.

Laundry lines in this part of Saxony tended to sport a lot of black clothes. Fashion? Depression? We couldn't tell...

Bees guard this gate:

When we finally arrived in Pirna, we took a quick look inside the Lutheran town church, St. Marien. A friend recently asked me why I like to scope out German churches so much, given that I'm areligious. As I've posted before, I consider it mixed-metaphor "truffle hunting": like a box of chocolates, you can't tell from the outside if the inside is going to be dark-chocolate Chambord (cream of the crop) or white-chocolate maple walnut (why even bother). Churches are usually the most architecturally interesting buildings in town, and admission is usually free (or at least cheap); and they can be filled with art ranging from amusing to spectacular, centuries old to brand new. Also, organs. So here's some of St. Marien:

Ceiling was definitely dark chocolate with fruit liqueur...

Jonah and the whale?

We stopped for refreshment before catching the train back to Dresden. In the photo below, I am pointing at a bucatini noodle, which makes a pretty ingenious compostable straw:

Ta da! 14.65 miles of the day's 18.4 total

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