The Brocken

Finally. I've been chattering on about this place since the trip started. The infamous DDR/ Soviet spy mountain... Also known as the site for witches' sabbaths, made famous in Goethe's Faust. I even read it so I was ready. Could have given it a miss, tbh, the play/poem, not the visit to the mountain.

The old buildings are still here. There's a small museum which somehow we missed going into, a toilet you have to pay for, a handful of stands selling food, beer, and Feuerstein liquor (yay food and beer), and a hotel. It would have been interesting to stay up there, and I don't know how I didn't look into it.

We did the short hike around the top, walked a bit down the Heinrich Heine Weg, the path we most likely would have hiked either down or up. The Brocken has it's own microclimate, and its said to be much colder and windier than the surrounding area. It wasn't that day. Also, I've read and seen on the few you tube videos I found on the area, that it's often shrouded in clouds, and you can't get a good view from the top. Again, we didn't have that problem. Good travel luck, I guess.

So now we have pictures of the old buildings, weird red lichen on the rocks, the views from the top, and a lot of flowers. Something that was alarming, the heather was in bloom all the way up here. Our next area to visit was Lüneburg Heath, for the annual heather bloom. I was worried if it was blooming at this elevation, we would miss it down there.Read more