Partnach Gorge – Germany

TLDR; Walked the paths in Partnach Gorge (Partnachklamm) and hiked the surrounding area with three of my friends. It was beautiful.

Three of my friends love going on active adventures together – usually hiking through nature trails or exploring a new city. I finally got tired of my isolation and decided to tag along for a few of them.
One weekend, we went to the Partnach Gorge – or Partnachklamm in German. At the entrance you pay a small fee and walk into this cave-like entrance into a mountain and follows an un-lit tunnel for a while. I thought about giving my eyes time to adjust to the dark, but before I could someone took out their phone and put their flashlight to the ground. Right, smart. Eventually, the walls get lighter and as I looked forward a bright light blurred my vision beyond the exit, until I walked out and there was this huge stream rushing by to my right. The mountainous walls towered over 200 feet above us, waterfalls scattered throughout.
I didn’t really get any pictures of the path that stood out to me. They were all okay. I was mostly trying to practice with the settings, but we also didn’t have a lot of time to stick around and take in the details. It was treated as more of just a path than the attraction itself, and people shepherded themselves along to the exit, opening up to the actual “gorge”.

So a gorge is a narrow valley between hills or mountains, typically with steep rocky walls and a stream running through it. Yes, I Googled it because I could not have told you exactly what was the “gorge” part at the gorge on my way there. The Partnach is a river that stretches for 11 miles through Bavaria, Germany. The gorge is over 2000 feet within that. Fun facts I learned from a PDF brochure I found on the internet – the Partnach Gorge was used in the 18th century to float logs as a method of transportation. It’s called log driving. They chopped wood in the valleys of Ferchen and Reintal, mark it with their brand, and send it down the river until they piled up at a timber yard and woodcutters gathered them and piled them up – I assume for later collection. Around 1885, the path was made to transport the wood more efficiently, and where there’s a path, people will walk it, so eventually hiking groups and adventure squads started to come around often enough to commercialize the area.

Anywhere there are rocks, there are various sizes of stone stacks scattered around. A “rock cairn” is a test of mental patience and balancing skills, and almost ominous to look at when you remember that you’ve seen these stacks literally anywhere else rocks meet water. But it’s a small way to say “I was here” without doing anything to harm the area. I mean, except for the boys who were practically caveman-like when trying to stack their rocks, as though slamming it into the rock below would flatten the rocks enough to stay.
Turns out cairns are actually used for navigation. Way before there were light houses or trail signs, people built these rock piles to point the way. When I looked up “rock piles” I found tons of articles communicating why you should NOT build cairns arbitrarily.
That said, enjoy my mini cairn. I’m not good at stacking rocks.

Averi was here

This doggo found a stick~ so cute!
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It’s weird to be out and about with people now. There was a good number of people along the path next to the mountain stream, and everyone wore their masks. We were able to spread out more along the hiking trails. As we entered the valley, we were surrounded by the bright, blue river and trees everywhere, leaving no space for a horizon. To the left was a small shore filled with rock stacks, or cairns. Some families had dogs, and I kept waiting for them to knock the stacks over as they ran about, but they never did – that I saw.

After following the Partnach, we veered off to a hiking path along the river, climbing higher to beer gardens and attractions at the top of the path. It was a long way down over that bridge.
I’m all for keeping the Earth how it is and not messing with the land, but it is pretty neat when you can walk through the middle of nature on some unassuming bridge on a mountain side.
Granted, the paths here are anything but unassuming, since they were specifically carved centuries ago for transporting goods, and later because of the capitalization of the gorge. Typical humans.

“Meadows forbidden” is the literal translation I got online. Just your run-of-the-mill No Trespassing sign. But I can’t read it inherently, so *snaps picture* The sign below is warning of free-roaming animals, which we did see as we walked the path. There were goats just chillin, and Alex went to go pet one because fences and aggressive animals do not stop this Texan lady. Well, most fences. She and a young goat felt a spark between them when she reached out to pet him through the openings. It shocked the rest of us in a less harmful way. 😂
I’m sure there was a sign somewhere that we couldn’t read.

A tall, Texan, sexy gunslinger, adventuring the world.

The things people do for a cool photo.

Not gonna lie, I am not super great with heights. I was so stressed seeing my friend Chandy climbing up the edge of the building. And I could only crawl when I got on that rooftop.