It's quite odd - in the past we've been on many climbing holidays to France and Spain, due to the good food, pretty scenery and great climbing, but we've never considered going to Germany. As far as I know, neither have any of our friends. Having now spent a month in the Frankenjura, in the 'Frankische Schweiz' national park in Bavaria, I can't work out why... As well as being a massive climbing area, it's also a very pleasant place to spend time, with plenty of non-climbing activities too. Here's a summary of what we've been up to - both the climbing and non-climbing bits.
Night time around here can be quite atmospheric. The forest seems to be full of mystery creatures that go 'squeak', and owls that sound so owl-ish that they seem unreal. The first time I heard one I thought it sounded like a person doing an imitation of an owl. I only became convinced that the owls were real after hearing them several times in different places - no one could possibly have that much free time... In some places there's a bit of an owl theme to the local decor. This was my favourite:
The weather took a colder, wetter turn in the second half of our time here. While slightly annoying from a climbing point of view, the autumnal weather brought out a whole range of cool mushrooms. A guy we met at the crag told us that some of them are edible, but we got distracted by climbing and forgot to find out which ones...
The brewing tradition in Bavaria is quite interesting. In 1487, the Duke of Bavaria introduced a rule, which was to become the Reinheitsgebot (Bavarian Purity Law), which stated that beer could only be brewed using three ingredients, barley, water and hops. This rule gradually spread throughout Bavaria, and later to the rest of Germany. According to Wikipedia, the restriction to barley was to make sure that there were enough other grains left over to make affordable bread, and the restriction to hops was to prevent people from using more esoteric preserving agents, such as henbane and fly agaric mushrooms! The rules have been relaxed somewhat nowadays (I'm still quite confused about where all the wheat beer we've been having fits in), but there is still considerable pride in Bavaria in the pure brewing traditions - many breweries still claim to be Reinheitsgebot compliant, even when this is demonstrably not the case. This means that there is a fairly narrow range of brews available (variations introduced through the type of malt, amount of hops, filtration and whether wheat is added or not), with every brewery producing its own take on a pilsner, dunkel lager, weizen, hefe-weizen, kristalweizen, dunkel-(hefe-)weizen, landbier, and kellerbier.
This has not been good for maintaining the healthy, clean-living lifestyle we've had on this trip so far...!
A few weeks ago, our friend Lia came out to visit us for a long weekend - a great excuse for a touristic interlude. On the first day, we decided on a whim to go to Bamberg, not really knowing much about it. Turns out it's a world heritage town. It's very pretty, with lots of old buildings
We also visited Burg Rabenstein, one of many castles in the area. It is one of more than 90 castles that lie on the Burgenstraße , a 1000 km cycle route that runs from Mannheim to Prague. Burg Rabenstein is a small castle that now functions partly as a hotel. Unfortunately, it turns out that you can't just wander in and look around, presumably because it would disturb the hotel guests. We went on the half-hour guided tour instead - it was in German, but the tour guide (who had an ye olde worlde costume and an impressive beard to match) kindly gave a summary in English just for us. It was a bit of a bizarre experience - particularly the bits where he broke into song.
I think the entrance fee for the castle may have been wasted on Lia though. The field of sunflowers outside was clearly better!
There's also a lot of cake! Most villages have a bakery serving a wide range of cakes and pastries. I was a bit surprised - it's something I associate strongly with France and I hadn't realised Germany did it too. My favourite Bavarian cake was Zwetschenkuchen (damson cake), particularly the varieties that had crumble topping on - I am definitely going to learn how to make this when I get home. I also really enjoyed nuss-schnecke (like a Danish pastry with hazelnut paste in it), and cherry golatschen (a sort of folded-over croissant filled with cherry jam).
In general, the climbing here is hard! Routes tend to be short and powerful, rather than the long endurance routes we were climbing in Spain, and are mostly on pockets, a climbing style that requires specific training to be good at.
Bolting, especially on the easy routes, can be a bit exciting. The local ethic is that, once something has been climbed, you can't add any more bolts or change their position. On the plus side, it preserves routes in their original form, and prevents them from being 'tamed', but on the negative side it means that some routes can be a bit scary, particularly the older, easier ones (having said that, there are plenty of 'normally' bolted routes around, and the guidebooks helpfully mark the position of the bolts on the topo so you always know what you're getting into!) My lead head, not that stable even at the best of times, utterly failed here to start with and I spent most of the time here toproping. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing in itself - I had many fun days trying lots of different things, of varying difficulties. Everything's graded in UIAA grades here, instead of French grades, and I found it best for the ego if I didn't try to convert. Highlights included a 35m VII+ at Roter Fels which had a crazy steep top section on big juggy pockets, a whole wall of amazing climbs between VII and VIII at Reichelsmuhler Wand, and a ridiculously steep VIII- at Herzwand, which was fun to try even though I could barely string three moves together. The leading mojo gradually started to come back towards the end: I had a fun day at Mittelbergwand leading a V+, two Vs and a IV+ (listed in ascending order of actual difficulty, in my opinion), and a few other bits and pieces.
As a climbing area, the Frankenjura is historically important - it was a place where sport climbing standards were pushed in the 1980s. It's the place where concept of the redpoint was invented - practising and refining the moves on a really hard route with the aim of eventually making a clean, no-falls ascent (the redpoint ascent). The name comes from the local custom where, if someone had bolted a route but hadn't managed to climb it yet, they would paint a red circle at the base of the route to signify this. When they finally managed a clean ascent of the route, they would indicate this by filling in the circle, making a 'rotes Punkt'. Actually painting red points on the rock isn't done any more, but you can still see the faded remnants of the originals in some places.
Fittingly, I ticked my first redpoint project of the trip here. It's weird that I managed to go for so long without trying to redpoint anything - it would have been good for my head to do more, but it never quite happened. At the start of the trip I was focused on 'just climbing', and I had to abandon a (much harder) project I had my eye on in France due to my hurty elbows.
The route was Mon Marie at Weisenstein. As climbing achievements go, it's not particularly impressive - it was a VI-, which translates to about 5b, but grades aren't important, right? Andy generously said he thought it was under-graded, and it was a style I find particularly challenging - steep moves between pockets, where it takes a while to work out which pockets are the good ones. It's a style that rewards confidence and punishes hesitancy - about as far from my ideal as it's possible to get. Even though it wasn't a particularly hard route (I definitely failed on the onsight attempt due to lack of head rather than lack of move-doing ability), it was fun to go through the process of figuring out the most efficient way to do the moves, finding the best clipping positions and piecing it all together. I found it really good for confidence. On my final go I was so focused on the moves I forgot about being scared - I'd been told loads of times that this happens but hadn't really believed it.
Non-climbing
The Forest
Most of the Frankenjura is forested. It's a working forest, but it's still pretty and well set up for tourism, with walking and cycling trails everywhere. In fact, there are so many, all signposted with different symbols, that it's actually quite confusing.
Night time around here can be quite atmospheric. The forest seems to be full of mystery creatures that go 'squeak', and owls that sound so owl-ish that they seem unreal. The first time I heard one I thought it sounded like a person doing an imitation of an owl. I only became convinced that the owls were real after hearing them several times in different places - no one could possibly have that much free time... In some places there's a bit of an owl theme to the local decor. This was my favourite:
The weather took a colder, wetter turn in the second half of our time here. While slightly annoying from a climbing point of view, the autumnal weather brought out a whole range of cool mushrooms. A guy we met at the crag told us that some of them are edible, but we got distracted by climbing and forgot to find out which ones...
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Bierkultur
There is a lot of beer here! According to the leaflet we got from the tourist information, the Frankische Schweiz is 'the holiday destination with the highest concentration of breweries in the world'. Beer in shops is ridiculously cheap - we found some for 26 cents for a 500 ml bottle. In some villages, I reckon you could probably turn up, close your eyes and walk in a random direction, and you'd find yourself in a pub or a biergarten. There's a general sense that beer is taken very seriously here:
The brewing tradition in Bavaria is quite interesting. In 1487, the Duke of Bavaria introduced a rule, which was to become the Reinheitsgebot (Bavarian Purity Law), which stated that beer could only be brewed using three ingredients, barley, water and hops. This rule gradually spread throughout Bavaria, and later to the rest of Germany. According to Wikipedia, the restriction to barley was to make sure that there were enough other grains left over to make affordable bread, and the restriction to hops was to prevent people from using more esoteric preserving agents, such as henbane and fly agaric mushrooms! The rules have been relaxed somewhat nowadays (I'm still quite confused about where all the wheat beer we've been having fits in), but there is still considerable pride in Bavaria in the pure brewing traditions - many breweries still claim to be Reinheitsgebot compliant, even when this is demonstrably not the case. This means that there is a fairly narrow range of brews available (variations introduced through the type of malt, amount of hops, filtration and whether wheat is added or not), with every brewery producing its own take on a pilsner, dunkel lager, weizen, hefe-weizen, kristalweizen, dunkel-(hefe-)weizen, landbier, and kellerbier.
This has not been good for maintaining the healthy, clean-living lifestyle we've had on this trip so far...!
Castles, and other touristing
The Frankische Schweiz is full of pretty little villages, most of the bigger ones well endowed with pubs and biergartens. We spent a lot of our time here based around Pottenstein and Goßweinstein. These villages are roughly in the centre of the region and are probably also the most popular with tourists. Pottenstein is very pretty, with lots of old timber-framed houses in a variety of colours. Goßweinstein is also pleasant, and has an unreasonably large cathedral for such a small village. |  |
A few weeks ago, our friend Lia came out to visit us for a long weekend - a great excuse for a touristic interlude. On the first day, we decided on a whim to go to Bamberg, not really knowing much about it. Turns out it's a world heritage town. It's very pretty, with lots of old buildings
We also visited Burg Rabenstein, one of many castles in the area. It is one of more than 90 castles that lie on the Burgenstraße , a 1000 km cycle route that runs from Mannheim to Prague. Burg Rabenstein is a small castle that now functions partly as a hotel. Unfortunately, it turns out that you can't just wander in and look around, presumably because it would disturb the hotel guests. We went on the half-hour guided tour instead - it was in German, but the tour guide (who had an ye olde worlde costume and an impressive beard to match) kindly gave a summary in English just for us. It was a bit of a bizarre experience - particularly the bits where he broke into song.
I think the entrance fee for the castle may have been wasted on Lia though. The field of sunflowers outside was clearly better!
Food
There are Gasthofen and restaurants all over the place here - mostly fairly affordable. The cuisine is very pig-based - schnitzel is ubiquitous (we had particularly good schnitzel at the Mager brewery restaurant in Pottenstein). The local delicacy seems to be pork shoulder (schaupferla), served with gravy, a potato dumpling and generous amounts of crackling. A lot of places serve wild game too, due to the surrounding forest being popular for hunting, but we didn't get the chance to try any.There's also a lot of cake! Most villages have a bakery serving a wide range of cakes and pastries. I was a bit surprised - it's something I associate strongly with France and I hadn't realised Germany did it too. My favourite Bavarian cake was Zwetschenkuchen (damson cake), particularly the varieties that had crumble topping on - I am definitely going to learn how to make this when I get home. I also really enjoyed nuss-schnecke (like a Danish pastry with hazelnut paste in it), and cherry golatschen (a sort of folded-over croissant filled with cherry jam).
The climbing
The Frankenjura is a huge climbing area - so huge that it's almost overwhelming for first-time visitors. There's over 10 000 routes spread over hundreds of different crags, and the guidebook spans two (enormous) volumes. You wouldn't necessarily realise this at first glance though - most of the crags themselves are quite small and hidden amongst the trees.
In general, the climbing here is hard! Routes tend to be short and powerful, rather than the long endurance routes we were climbing in Spain, and are mostly on pockets, a climbing style that requires specific training to be good at.
Bolting, especially on the easy routes, can be a bit exciting. The local ethic is that, once something has been climbed, you can't add any more bolts or change their position. On the plus side, it preserves routes in their original form, and prevents them from being 'tamed', but on the negative side it means that some routes can be a bit scary, particularly the older, easier ones (having said that, there are plenty of 'normally' bolted routes around, and the guidebooks helpfully mark the position of the bolts on the topo so you always know what you're getting into!) My lead head, not that stable even at the best of times, utterly failed here to start with and I spent most of the time here toproping. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing in itself - I had many fun days trying lots of different things, of varying difficulties. Everything's graded in UIAA grades here, instead of French grades, and I found it best for the ego if I didn't try to convert. Highlights included a 35m VII+ at Roter Fels which had a crazy steep top section on big juggy pockets, a whole wall of amazing climbs between VII and VIII at Reichelsmuhler Wand, and a ridiculously steep VIII- at Herzwand, which was fun to try even though I could barely string three moves together. The leading mojo gradually started to come back towards the end: I had a fun day at Mittelbergwand leading a V+, two Vs and a IV+ (listed in ascending order of actual difficulty, in my opinion), and a few other bits and pieces.
As a climbing area, the Frankenjura is historically important - it was a place where sport climbing standards were pushed in the 1980s. It's the place where concept of the redpoint was invented - practising and refining the moves on a really hard route with the aim of eventually making a clean, no-falls ascent (the redpoint ascent). The name comes from the local custom where, if someone had bolted a route but hadn't managed to climb it yet, they would paint a red circle at the base of the route to signify this. When they finally managed a clean ascent of the route, they would indicate this by filling in the circle, making a 'rotes Punkt'. Actually painting red points on the rock isn't done any more, but you can still see the faded remnants of the originals in some places.
Fittingly, I ticked my first redpoint project of the trip here. It's weird that I managed to go for so long without trying to redpoint anything - it would have been good for my head to do more, but it never quite happened. At the start of the trip I was focused on 'just climbing', and I had to abandon a (much harder) project I had my eye on in France due to my hurty elbows.
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| Bold colour combinations make you climb harder... |
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