Guided hikes in Baiersbronn

The Baiersbronner Wanderhimmel, Baiersbronn's hiking network, is easy enough to explore on your own. With 550 kilometres of marked trails, there is little room to get lost. And yet there is a particular appeal in being led. Between a beautiful path and one that stays in the memory, there is often just one person. Someone who knows the stories behind the landscape.

Hiking guides know where the forest is loveliest in the morning, which hut has something fresh from the oven and why the tarn is so dark. Hike with a guide and you get the story along with the scenery, and a pace that suits everyone thrown in.

Baiersbronn Touristik keeps up a full programme of guided tours throughout the year, from gentle nature walks to sporty circuits that clock up the kilometres. The guides come from the region and, beyond the well-known destinations, what they show you above all are their own favourite corners, the ones no map highlights.

In winter the programme does not stop, it changes. Winter hikes across the snow-covered high ground then take their place in the calendar. Dates and registration run through the tourist office's events calendar. For guests of many establishments in the region, the tours are even free of charge through the guest card programmes.

The ranger-led tours of the Black Forest National Park are a category of their own. Full-time and volunteer rangers, wilderness educators and nature guides offer an extensive programme of excursions over the year, including walks through the untouched forest reserve and tours to the waterfalls, usually free of charge.

In the national park it is less about kilometres than about understanding. Why is deadwood left where it falls? What does the bark beetle have to do with new forest? Walk through the core zone with a ranger once and you will see the forest differently afterwards. Many tours start at the National Park Centre at Ruhestein, a quarter of an hour from Obertal.

Nor does anyone have to set out alone from the hotel itself. Engel Obertal works with hiking guide Willi Seid, who has known the paths of the northern Black Forest for decades and regularly takes guests of the house along on his tours. His walks take you to where the Wanderhimmel is at its most impressive, and they start right in the Rechtmurg valley, with no drive to get there.

If you would rather head out by yourself between the guided dates, reception has ready-planned route suggestions and equipment to borrow, rucksacks and walking poles included.

In short, almost everyone. In a few hours, newcomers get an overview of the region that would take days to piece together on their own. Solo travellers find company, families a pace that short legs can keep up with, and ambitious hikers those paths that are not on every hiking portal.

And even committed solo walkers do well to take at least one guided tour per stay, as a source of ideas for everything they go on to do by themselves.