Feldberg

The treeline breaks at about 1200 metres and then you’re above it, which is a kind of shock when you’ve spent several days inside the forest. I came up the Feldberg on a hiking path from Todtnauberg in June, a trail that climbed steadily through dense fir until, without a moment of transition, the trees ended and the mountain opened into a landscape of dwarf shrubs and rough grass and sky. The change in air quality was immediate — colder, thinner, moving. The summit was another thirty minutes and it was already in view, the Feldbergturm radar tower marking it against cloud. I stopped walking for a moment simply because the shift in scale required adjustment.

At 1493 metres, the Feldberg is the highest point in the Black Forest and the highest ground in Germany south of the Bavarian Alps. On clear days — and clarity here is a variable, unpredictable gift — the view extends south to the Swiss Alps, east across the German highland, west over the Rhine plain to the Vosges. On the day I arrived, cloud was building from the south and the Alps were ghost-pale at the horizon, barely differentiated from the sky, but present. The summit plateau has the quality that high places share across every mountain range I’ve been in: a particular silence made of wind and the absence of human noise, a feeling of being outside ordinary time.

The Feldsee, a small dark glacial lake in a cirque below the summit’s eastern face, is the mountain’s other gift. The path down to it from the summit takes about twenty minutes and passes through the transition zone where the dwarf shrubs give way to first firs and then, abruptly, the deep forest closes in again. The lake sits in its hollow like something left behind, dark green-black and cold even in August, ringed by forest with no visible exit to the outside world. I sat on a boulder at the shore and ate the bread and cheese I’d been carrying since Todtnauberg and watched a pair of ducks moving across the surface with the unmoved composure of animals in a place that belongs to them.

In winter the Feldberg operates as a ski resort — the largest in the Black Forest, with reliable snow at altitude when the valleys below are just grey and wet. The ski infrastructure is visible in summer as a series of quiet lifts and empty pistes colonised by wildflowers, which has its own charm. The Feldberg Nature Reserve that covers the summit area protects a population of rare alpine plants, and in June the meadows along the western slopes carry orchids and marsh gentian and the particular coarse-leaved grass that only grows above a certain altitude. I learned the names of none of them but walked slowly anyway.

When to go: June through September for hiking, with late June and July bringing wildflowers on the upper meadows. December through March for skiing, though snowfall varies year to year. Avoid the summit in poor weather — conditions change fast at this altitude and the summit path can ice over in spring and autumn with no warning.