Resting in a national park

Today was a day off in the sense that I was sleeping in the same hotel for another night and trying to avoid doing any hard exercise. But given my compulsion to exercise and the fact I was in a beautiful national park, I still managed to bike about 25km and hike for 2 hours.

The motto of national parks is Let Nature be Nature. To become a National Park (there‘s a global organization which oversees this), you also must fulfill certain criteria, one of which the park brochure listed as “keep at least 75% of the surface unmanipulated by humans for at least 30 years.“ Cool.

According to the German Forestry Industry, native beech trees would cover about 75% of all German forests. But most of those have been wiped out (slowly via settlement over time and then more quickly via a small international conflict about 80 years ago) and replaced with fast-growing spruce and pine, which now combine to make up over 50% of German forests. These are the type of forests around Berlin. Generally monoculture, and generally boring. Don‘t get me wrong, I‘ll take a monoculture forest as scenery over agricultural land every day of the week. But still, they‘re a bit boring.

So many species

Not the Eifel National Park forest though. I counted at least seven species!…because I don‘t know any more than that. Kidding. I think I could get to ten. And I‘m pretty sure I was stuck on a Genus, too, as I think there were multiple oak species in the forest. Anyway, it was wild. Literally. And figuratively. So many species mixed together, so much competition for space, light, and nutrients, and so many fallen trees decaying on the forest floor, providing nutrients to countless other organisms. It felt a little unsettling, though the 90kph winds gusting through the treetops, the creaks and cracks from the forest, the amount of debris brought down by the winds probably played a role too.

It‘s hard to tell from the photos how dense and diverse the forest was, but I‘ll spare you an attempt at a thousand words which could do the job better.

Also, the park surrounds a river which was dammed and which cuts dramatically into the local plateau:

Not bad, eh?

I‘m turning tree-hugger

My appreciation for nature has grown as I‘ve gotten older, not only because I‘ve seen more of it and seen more of it destroyed, but also because I‘ve learned more about it. In that vein, I‘ll throw in a quick book recommendation: The Overstory by Richard Powers. It‘s a figurative love letter to trees, a fictional story filled with real facts about trees, and a story which resonated with me. You should read it. If nothing else, it‘s a great story which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but I‘m quite sure you‘ll come away with, as I did, a much greater appreciation for trees and old-growth forests. Which of course, drove the inclusion of this stop on my itinerary :)