It's a Harz knock life

A few weekends ago, we headed up to the Harz National Park for a long weekend of climbing. It's something of an annual trip for my friends here, but it was the first time I'd been. We slept in the garden at Christian's parents' house, ate their food, drank their schnapps, and got hand-knitted socks from his mom. So yeah, it was great.

The Harz National Park is in north-central Germany, approximately (very approximately) where the yellow star is and just east of the former East/West German border. Christian's parents missed ending up in East Germany by about 10 km.

The climbing in the Harz is on granite, which I think is my new favourite kind of climbing. It's a little hard on the knees, elbows, ankles, and fingertips, but skin grows back and just look how pretty it is!

And I finally got to do some multi-pitch! Now in my mind, multi-pitch is hanging from a belay you built yourself, 300 metres up with nothing but air beneath you. But, thank goodness, that's not what all multi-pitch is like, otherwise you might not be reading this because I might not have written it because I might have died.

We did one last route as the sun set on Monday evening and then drove back to Nuremberg in the dark.

And now, history: During WWII, the Harz region was quite important for munitions manufacturing and a lot of the labour was supplied by forced-labour camps. V-2 rockets were built underground by prisoners working in horrifying conditions. At the end of the war, 40,000 of these prisoners were marched through the Harz as the German line retreated from the Allied advance. 10,000 died of exhaustion or were shot because they couldn't keep up. Just your daily reminder that something horrible has happened in every beautiful place.

And lest you think that's a depressing way to end a post, I'm sure something beautiful has happened in most horrible places too.