Harz Hexenstieg Walk Overview
Towards the end of June 2024 I spent four days (spread across five) walking the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg (Harz Witches Trail) in northern central Germany.
The Harzer-Hexen-Stieg is a 60 mile long walk, with no formal stages (though the local tourist board does make some suggestions as to where you could break your journey), across northern central Germany’s hilly Harz region. It runs from Osterode-am-Harz on the south western edge of the Upper Harz region to Thale on its north eastern fringe. Along the way it passes through or near historic mining settlements like Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Altenau and Neuwerk, crosses Torfhaus Moor, currently the site of ambitious rewilding efforts, traverses the much mythologised Brocken (northern and central Germany’s highest mountain), before heading down into the rocky, thickly wooded territory of the Bodetal Gorge.
Generally the walking is fairly easy going for a reasonably fit person, but some of the longer days with lots of steady uphill trudging, can be harder going. As a rule, in common with long distance walks across Germany, the paths which you walk are usually very well maintained and waymarked (though I downloaded a mostly pretty accurate gpx. file of the route, and the tourist board provides tracks for their suggested stages). Something to bear in mind is that with a few exceptions there is not a huge amount accommodation situated in the places you are likely to need it, directly on the footpath, so each day’s journey time needs to factor in a few extra miles getting to and from hotels, guesthouses and youth hostels. Likewise for lunch, if you do not take food with you, there are likely to be a few days when you will need to take a slight detour to find sustenance.
Germany’s Harz
Within Germany the Harz has a mythical status. The hills covered with primeval looking heathland in the western parts of the region, and thick woodland in the east, have a distinctive hazy quality of light, with vivid dawns and sunsets. No wonder that this lonely, rugged, often sublime landscape is where much of Germany’s witch mythology is rooted. A fact which Harz residents are clearly immensely proud of. Walking across the region is to encounter blasted moorland, the highly prominent Brocken Ridge, and deep river gorges full of tangled old trees and weird rock formations. The Brocken which at 1,142 metres above sea level is the tallest mountain in non-Alpine Germany, is much lionised in German literature, feted as the place the witches fly to on Walpurgisnacht (30th April) to dance.
Old school sublimity and spookiness aside, there is also a decidedly modern sense of terror about the place. Not just the banshee shriek of the powerful little steam trains which service the region’s branch lines. A storm in the early 1990s demolished many of the region’s once iconic spruce pines. The sheer volume of dead wood on the forest floor encouraged an infestation of bark beetles, especially in the western half of the Harz region, which killed off almost all the remaining pine trees. Which means that for much of the route you pass big stands of dead pine trees. These dead trees and sparse expanses of newly re-emergent healthland, coupled with the fact that the inner-German border cleaved the Harz in two, as recently as thirty five years ago, and the decidedly atomic age styling of the strikingly prominent TV transmit on top of the Brocken, combine to give the Harz a decided atomic winter feeling. Albeit, one offset by the way in which nature is rapidly transforming the hillsides where a generation ago pine plantations stood.
The bark beetles destroyed the forestry industry in the western and central Harz, but conservationists are delighted. The creation of a national park in the east of the region by the East German government in 1990 as one of its final acts, coupled with the formation of a national park in the former West German part of the Harz in 1994, led to a unified national park coming into being in 2006. Seizing upon the opportunity created by the mass pine tree die-off, an ambitious programme of rewilding was embarked upon, especially in the very heart of the Harz around the Brocken, which is already bearing fruit as the region’s biodiversity increases and the landscape starts to take on appearance more akin to how it likely looked before extensive human intervention. Seldom have I seen so many insects and different kinds of plants. It will be interesting to see how this progresses and how the landscape looks in decades to come.
In geological terms the Harz is a range of predominantly low mountains, chiefly composed of shale rocks, sandstone and granite. The area is amongst Germany’s most geologically diverse and has been recognised by UNESCO as a Geopark.
Walking the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg in Four Days Spread Over Five
Day One (Osterode-am-Harz to Clausthal-Zellerfeld)
On the day before commencing the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg I travelled by train from the UK to Göttingen in Lower Saxony, the state’s largest settlement south west of the Upper Harz region. The city and wider region has interesting and often overlooked connections to the UK, having formed part of the Hanoverian principality that the UK’s current royal family presided over, prior to their appointment to the British throne in 1714. The family retained control of both polities until 1837 when Victoria – as a woman – was not permitted to take the Hanoverian throne. The first two generations in particular retained close ties to northwestern Germany with Britain’s George II granting the University of Göttingen its charter in the 1730s. The city’s large and prestigious university is undoubtedly a key factor in why the city has a green, pleasant, slightly sleepy, academic feel to it.
After spending the night in a capsule hotel handily placed for the station just outside the inner-ring road I took a series of increasingly small local trains from Göttingen heading northwards into the Harz Mountains proper. The destination being Osterode-am-Harz, a quiet market town today, but a major trading and mining hub in centuries past, which straddles the boundary of the Upper Harz area.
Heeding the local tourism board’s advice to make the first day of the Harz Hexenstieg a short one, walking wise, I had lunch upon reaching Osterode-am-Harz and set out for the start of the trail around half one. Having reached the starting point, next to a grand carving of a witch affixed to what looked like a bus shelter, I commenced the walk.
As is usually the case with long distance walks the first few hundred metres was a steady uphill slog through a suburban housing estate, out into the fields. Here the route quickly becomes a forestry track, winding steadily, but never all that steeply up into the hills.
Soon the landscape changes taking on the character of mixed woodland and exposed heath that characterises the Upper Harz region. On the day I began the walk, a Saturday, the paths were quiet but not deserted.
After climbing intermittently, the path levels out on high ground, with commanding views, following a ridge for an extended distance.
Nearing the end of the day’s walk I reached a network of large ponds, sluices and watercourses just east of the town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld. These comprise part of the historic Upper Harz Water Management System, a spectacular network of human created lakes and interconnected watercourses, constructed for mining purposes between the 16th and 19th Centuries. Since the 1970s they have been recognised as an important historic monument, achieving a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation in 1992, and extensively restored. While created by people for industrial purposes, today the ponds and watercourses add interest to the landscape, being now tranquil and often fringed with trees.
Leaving the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg route to reach my hotel in Clausthal-Zellerfeld in the far distance I got my first sight of the Brocken crowned with its ominous looking TV transmitting station off in the far distance.
Day Two (Clausthal-Zellerfeld to Torfhaus)
My overnight accommodation in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, a historic mining town, now dominated by a prestigious mining university which draws staff and students from all over the world, was very pleasant. But I made the basic mistake of booking a hotel on the far side of town from the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg. This meant that it took around an hour of additional walking to get between the route and where I was staying. This was not a huge hardship as it did mean that I got a good feel for the town.
Back on course much of day two, which I found the hardest going physically, with the great quantity of steep gradients, involved following the restored culverts of the Upper Harz Water Management System.
This winds its way across the scrubby, biodiverse heathland that now comprises the landscape of the western Harz Mountains. It is tricky to imagine how it looked not so long ago prior to storms and bark beetles felling the commercial pine plantations that had come to dominate the hillsides.
Over halfway to Torfhaus I left the path at the little town of Altenau, and old mining settlement like everywhere in the region, and went to find some lunch. Despite it being early summer in a tourist district this was trickier than you might imagine it being a Sunday which is still widely observed as a closed day in Germany even by enterprises that are not necessarily mandated to close by law.
Refuelling, I picked my way back uphill towards the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg route, which winds its way across the healthland, working steadily upwards.
Quite tired but only a mile or two from Torfhaus and the end of the days walking a final scramble down into a deep gorge, then a trapeze up a steep track, brought me out into a surreal summer time ski resort, utterly becalmed by the lack of snow for much of the year. The Upper Harz has a skiing industry in the colder months when snow tends to fall quite thickly on the high ground.
The skiing slopes mark the entrance to Torfhaus, famed as the place where Goethe stayed prior to ascending the Brocken. This mountain looms in the near distance just east of the village. Torfhaus has the vibe of Aviemoor, and it is not just the skiing, doubtless pretty much nobody lives there, with the village consisting of a very large youth hostel, several almost equally big outward bound centres apparently owned by various Lower Saxon local education authorities, an Alpine style lodge and chalet village, several outdoor gear stores, a national park centre, one snack stand, two restaurants, and most bizarrely a very tall wooden observation tower. Payment of the Borough of Altenau’s tourist tax gets you free admission to the latter.
Torfhaus sits between seven and eight hundred metres above sea level, significantly higher than any British settlement, no wonder I was tired having climbed so high to get there. Seeing twilight playing off the distant hillside of the Brocken ridge made it worthwhile.
Day Three (Torfhaus to Schierke)
After a restful night in Torfhaus my third day of walking dawned bright and sunny. This was felicitous because the summit of the Brocken, which the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg takes you up and over, is wreathed in clouds for around three hundred days a year. Summer does not necessarily guarantee better visibility.
Following in Goethe’s footsteps I set out from Torfhaus to climb the mountain. The area due east of Torfhaus which the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg passes through is one of the areas where nature conservation is most advanced. It has Germany’s highest nature conservation designation meaning that there are strict rules about staying on the path and not disturbing the land that you pass through.
There can be little doubt that the low intervention conservation strategy that the Harz National Park is pursuing is bearing fruit. Where once there were pine plantations a sparser, yet spectacular new ecosystem is clearly taking shape.
Partway across this relatively flat expanse beneath the mountain peaks, known as Torfhaus Moor, the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg crosses between the state of Lower Saxony and the state of Saxony-Anhalt. This line today serves a purely administrative purpose but between 1949 and 1990 it was part of the Inner-German Border dividing West and East Germany. An old border marker has been retained at the spot allowing Harzer-Hexen-Stieg walkers to know when they have crossed the line which once divided central and northern Germany in two.
Shortly after crossing the old frontier a steep forestry road picked out in concrete blocks, which it is easy to imagine Walsall Pact tanks and armoured personnel carriers once crawling along, rapidly ascends to near the top of the Brocken ridge. Here a path running northwards alongside the track of the Brockenbahn narrow gauge railway, which miraculously in a spectacular feat of engineering manages to ascend to the summit without needing a ratchet, leads towards the base of the Brocken’s crown.
From there, a relatively short, relatively dull, moderately steep, asphalt roads runs up to the mountain’s summit. Passing through a grove of hardy spruce pines, which detailed National Park information boards explain, are very much in their element, over one thousand metres above sea level, and despite their small stature are in some cases hundreds of years old. The problem, the board’s claim came when the pines which are supposed to dwell at heights of over eight hundred metres above sea level were transposed into tightly packed monocultural plantations at much lower altitudes. I found that I had made rather good time, it having taken little more than two hours, a lot less than I had allowed for, to ascend the Brocken.
A somewhat bizarre scene awaits trekkers to the top of the Brocken. The views are spectacular, the high altitude landscape is distinctive, but with the gift shops, snack stands, radio transmitters, hotel and restaurant with beer terrace. Remote and tranquil it is not. This said the summit has been a mass tourist destination, much like the top of Snowdon in the UK for generations, at least as far back as the 19th Century, so arguably now the seaside vibe, leavened here and there these days, with a carefully fenced off meadows of “rewilded” mountain flowers, is as much a part of the Brocken’s mythology as witchcraft and almost as much a part of it’s ecology as the weathered spruce pine.
Much of the descent from the Brocken is along an asphalt road, steadily descending from the mountain’s peak. The final stretch for this relatively short stage was along a forestry track, with a final stretch for me steeply downhill to the village of Schierke, where I had opted to spend the night.
Schierke is a pleasant but also slightly strange place. It is rather bigger than Torfhaus, but whereas Clausthal-Zellerfeld gets energy from its mining university it seems hard to imagine Schierke buzzing outside of ski season and maybe not even then. There are a number of derelict looking hotels and guesthouses in the village which look like they have seen better days. It is as if the eastern half of the Harz’s tourism industry had not entirely recovered from the collapse of the GDR. I stayed in a very pleasant guesthouse, very clean and well maintained, but slightly creepy too, as I was the only guest, looking out the back onto a stoney hillside dotted with craggy trees.
Day Four (Schierke to Neuwerk)
Leaving Schierke having called in at the village’s very posh little supermarket, like a German Waitrose or Booths, as Day Four looked to be the sole day I would not pass anywhere near a restaurant, cafe or kiosk on the Harzer Hexenstieg at lunchtime, I clambered up a steep track back to the trail.
From here the path runs steadily downhill to the foot of the Brocken ridge. This marks the end of the highly protected part of the Harz National Park. Passing a grand sprawling national park centre, akin to a lodge, the route suddenly brings you out into verdent, evidently farmed countryside.
Here, you suddenly enter a lower lying, albeit still hilly part of the Harz. a landscape marked more by rock formations and river gorges, especially those cut by the River Bode which rises on the lower slopes of the Brocken and which the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg broadly follows all the way from Schierke to its terminus at Thale.
Just after leaving the highly protected part of the National Park the route passes Drei Annen Honne. This is a major junction where – as the name implies – three lines of the Harz narrow gauge railway and three roads meet. Quirks of history and hydrology mean that the wetter western chunk of the region which was historically in West Germany has the historic mine waterways and ponds, while the eastern bit, which was part of the German Democratic Republic in the postwar period, has an extensive narrow gauge rail network owned by a syndicate of town and district councils.
From here the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg leads you along a very easy to walk set of forestry tracks through surviving pine plantations to the village of Königshütte which sprawls along the main road running through it, bound by the River Bode gorge.
At Königshütte the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg splits into two routes, a northern and a southern option. Prior to setting off I had resolved to take the slightly shorter northern arm, largely just because it had slightly more accomodation options along it.
The northern arm of the walk quickly brings you to a place where the Bode was dammed in the 1950s to create a drinking water reservoir. Here you follow the path along its banks for the duration. A long thin expanse of water crouching at the bottom of the river valley.
Nearing the dam at the far end of the reservoir if you look back then there is a superb view of the Brocken receding behind you in the distance.
Following an old miners track through a mixture of healthland and forest, high above the River Bode, the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg steadily approaches the village of Rubeland.
Rubeland has a split character, on the one hand it is a part of the Harz that still retains some substantial extractive industry. Approaching the village from the west you pass beneath a mighty enclosed conveyor belt serving a quarry high up in the hills.
On the other hand the village’s centre is highly touristy, as if a seafront has been plonked down in the middle of a river gorge in the centre of the country. The effect is rather like Matlock Bath in the Derwent Valley on the eastern edge of the Peak District. I have not looked it up, but maybe the two are twinned? They certainly are in spirit.
The Harzer-Hexen-Stieg cuts to a view point high above Rubeland for a final spectacular view back towards the Brocken and the heart of the Upper Harz region.
Before taking you back to a river path following the Bode. This soon comes out on the edge of the small, very well preserved, mining village of Neuwerk.
This was where I had decided to stay for the night, reserving a room at the excellent Bodetaler Basecamp Lodge. A fairly recently opened lodge with slightly hostel like vibes, but ultimately a boutique feel. The room I was assigned was in an annex and had a river terrace. Due to it still being quite early in the week the hotel manager put in a group order for pizza for all the guests from a local restaurant. It turned out to be very good pizza for the price.
A previous occupant of the Bodetaler Basecamp Lodge site was the social club of the East German TV broadcaster. In the morning when I went for breakfast in the bar and dining room area, there were some excellent, colourful, fairly abstract stained glass windows with mountain and forest themes. They looked to me like they probably dated from that era. It was good to see that they had been carefully retained. A little further into Neuwerk there stands what looks like another old lodge or holiday accommodation block (which I found out later prior to the 1990s was used by the East German state run Young Pioners youth movement). But this once is in a state of utter disrepair, clearly awaiting somebody who’ll do it up.
Day Five (Neuwerk – Thale)
Having stayed in Neuwerk overnight I still had around sixteen miles of the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg still to walk to reach the finishing point in Thale. Easily doable in a day however, I had booked onto the 14:17 from Thale to Saxony-Anhalt’s capital Magdeburg so as to catch an onward train to Berlin. It would not be a disaster if I did not make the train as I did not have a timed ticket, but I did not want to get to Berlin all that late either.
So, I left the Bodetaler Basecamp Lodge at 08:30 and picked up the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg trail heading east. After Neuwerk the path plunges down into thick broadleaf woodland following the River Bode.
Then it reaches another reservoir, this one notable for being home to the Titan RT, a recently constructed tourist attraction, which claims at 450 metres, to be amongst the longest in the world. One option for Harzer-Hexen-Stieg walkers is to leave the official path and traverse the Titan RT instead. Despite being pressed for time, not being hugely keen on heights, I declined to do this, following the official path instead.
After scrambling along the forest tracks, the trail leads via a somewhat circumlocution route along forestry roads out besides a dam just outside the village of Wendfurth.
At Wendfurth the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg picks up an old road, long bypassed by a more modern route, which runs along the bottom of the River Bode gorge, it is pleasant and easy walking, which I was grateful for, because it enabled me to make very good time.
This road, occasionally used by vehicles, continues along the southern edge of the large, dispersed village of Altenbrak, which is not unakin to Königshütte, further west which I had passed through the day before.
After Altenbrak a relatively flat easy track leads through woodland high up above the Bode. i figured that I was around about halfway to Thale now, and was increasingly confident that I would make my train, but carried on walking quickly, regardless.
Not far east of Altenbrak lies Treseberg which is one of the prettiest villages on the walk, comprising half timbered houses surrounded by steep gorge sides, covered in thick forest. It rather reminded me of Symonds Yat in Wye Valley to the far south west of the Midlands, right where Herefordshire turns into Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire.
Right on the stroke of twelve I stepped onto the Bodetal Gorge path, the final section of the Hexenstieg, running right to the edge of Thale.
This is a popular and well worn stretch of path, probably the busiest part of the Harz, besides the Brocken, that I encountered on the walk.
It starts off running through thick broadleaf forest, before the gorge gets progressively deeper and rockier. No wonder that Goethe was drawn to having his witches fly along it on Walpurgisnacht enroute to the Brocken. I did not have time, but a popular detour right at the end of the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg is up to a plateau high above the river gorge known as the Hexentanzplatz (“The Witches Dance Floor”).
Descending from one dramatic set of cliffs I reached the first kiosk on the edge of Thale. Tempted to stop for lunch I pressed on, soon passing the town’s imposing youth hostel and reaching a gentle river walk. This leads out into a river side park where cable cars ascend from towards the Hexentanzplatz.
From here it is only a few hundred metres across a genteel park to the town’s railway station and the end of the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg. I reached the station around about 13:30 having covered the 16 miles from Neuwerk in roughly five hours.
Here there was a kiosk where I could get some food while waiting for my train. And opposite the station platforms there stands an excellent, clearly well cared for, public mural dating back to the time of the German Democratic Republic.
I would definitely recommend the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg to anybody with reasonably good fitness, who doesn’t mind going to a part of Germany largely geared up for domestic tourism (levels of English proficiency in the western part of the Harz are reasonable. In the eastern bit most of the people I encountered did not really speak English. A legacy of the division of Germany between 1949 and 1990), and who would like to get to know this fascinating, starkly beautiful region.