Sunday, June 04, 2017

Walking the Swiss-German border along the "Eiserne Hand"

The weather forecast isn't what you'd hope for in the mountains, so we opt to stay local and do a hike from a book we have on hiking around the border of Basel. In this particular case we pick an area that's also the border to Germany.

Starting from a tram stop in Riehen we do a goofy "there then back" to cross the train tracks before turning off into the green and heading up a bit to hit the border at marker 47. Following the path we cross the border and then zag back and head up into the woods to hit marker 49 (48 is in the field somewhere behind us). After taking the second picture of Andrea with a border marker, it's clear what we're going to be doing for the rest of the hike. Normally we'd end up with greg on all these pictures, but since Andrea doesn't have her camera with her greg's taking pictures with his phone, so we get more pics of Andrea. :-)

We continue along the border through the woods, along the amusing finger that leads to Eiserne Hand, back into farmland at Maienbühl, back down into the valley at Hinterengeli, then back up again to Orthalde and so on until we pass the tower at Chrischona and hit the restaurant, where we stop for refreshment and to enjoy the views (the Alps are visible from here on a good-weather day, which today isn't really). We manage to get photos of almost all the border markers up to number 100, which we hit shortly before the Chrischona.

The way back down to the Rhine is along another very nice path through a mix of woods and fields, down, down, down until we hit the bus stop near the border crossing on the Rhine.

This was a nice walk through some surprisingly green and rural bits of Basel.

The track:
Stats: 15.8km, ~500m up, ~500m down


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