The 1000 Metre Challenge
Caroline and I have been very much missing the mountains of Switzerland since we moved to the flatlands of Brandenburg, Germany, in 2018. Cycling constantly on the flat can get pretty boring. We have even managed to organise a couple of our rides to take in the highest peak in Brandenburg, the Hagelberg, at the grand height of 201m above sea level! (* - see footnote)
Most recently: https://www.strava.com/activities/3779307929
One day over coffee as we were sadly reviewing our ride statistics - 150 metres of elevation here, maybe 200 or even 250 there - Caroline speculated whether there was any possibility of planning a day's route to reach a thousand. I took on the challenge and got busy with the Strava route planner! Basically, the route involved joining up all the decent hills we know in the vicinity of Potsdam into a reasonably interesting and non-repetitive ride; I didn't really fancy just riding round the same hilly loop over and over again - you might as well stay at home on your turbo trainer! The route turned out pretty convoluted, though, as you can see from the map...
Scheduling a day to actually ride it turned out to be a different matter, as it's too long for my working day "non-commute" slot, and at weekends we have been mostly busy with other stuff. Finally, a Sunday arrived with nothing else in the diary and Caroline resting from a 100km ride on the Saturday (although she instigated this plan, she doesn't currently fancy riding it herself); as well as a decent-ish weather forecast, with the stress on the "ish".
The forecast, checked the previous evening, suggested rain moving in from around noon. I reckoned I could do the ride in about 6 hours, including stops, so I wanted to get away at about 5am and be home by 11. What could possibly go wrong?
The first thing that went wrong was that I didn't actually get away until 05.30, having decided I wanted to make some last minute tweaks to the route plan; the second thing was that the forecast had changed to rain from 09.00 instead of 12. I made sure I had my rain jacket with me, and set off anyway.
The first summit was easy to "bag": the 74m-altitude Ruinenberg, which is literally right behind the building we live in. I was at the top in less than 5 minutes.
Next up, just a short hop across town, was the marginally higher Pfingstberg, with its ornate Belvedere overlooking the lakes to the north-east.
After that I had a flat section skirting the shore of those lakes through the Neuer Garten park, still admiring that beautiful sunrise, which of course I had to photograph ... I was stopping for so many photographs that it was already clear I was going to go well over my time budget for the ride!
Having traversed Neuer Garten and crossed eastwards from Potsdam into Berlin on the notorious Glienicker Brücke, I came to the only duplicate summit of the day - which I didn't really count as a duplicate because I approached it from two different directions, after looping back with a couple of other small hills in between. No photos, as this is basically just the crest of a rise in the road (although at 86m, already higher than those first two hills!) in the forest between Wannsee and Pfaueninsel. This loop is a go-to feature of my "non-commute" rides when I fancy tackling a little bit of a gradient.
After bagging these initial few hills, I had a longish flat drag through the southeastern suburbs of Potsdam - trying to push the speed here to catch up on schedule - before the first significant gravel section of the day, which took me first up the Grosser Ravensberg, in the forest to the south of the city, and then northwards up the Telegrafenberg which overlooks the river and the city centre. I had never been up Grosser Ravensberg before, and the approach turned out to be up an insanely steep concrete-slab track (leading to a restaurant at the top) which required my lowest gear - and on the "Titanium Devil" that is very low indeed - 24 front x 40 rear.
Grosser Ravensberg had a glimpse of a view, between encroaching trees, of the glowering towers of Berlin silhouetted in the east against the bright early morning sky; the accompanying information board didn't describe the view, but the life cycle of wild bees - part of a nature trail. It was two hours since breakfast and I was getting hungry, so I propped my bike against the info board and tucked into the home-made buns and flask of coffee which I had brought with me (even though I'd hoped to get further into the ride before stopping).
I missed a trick here, because it turns out that there is also a Kleiner Ravensberg nearby - which, bizarrely, is a few metres higher than its "Grosser" sibling - and I could have collected a bit of extra elevation by including it in my route, had I spotted it while planning.
The descent from Grosser Ravensberg was also insanely steep, and on sand - being risk averse, I walked the steepest bit! - before a long steady gravel ascent to Telegrafenberg, where I took a wrong turning up a cobbled dead end which led to a secondary summit crowned by a turning circle and a crescent of semi-derelict garages, a somewhat odd thing to find at the top of a hill. Anyway, the dead end gained me a few extra metres, so that was ok! At dead on 8am, as I passed the "Kaiser-Friedrich-Blick" - a commanding viewpoint over the river Havel across to Potsdam City, complete with a stone bench, graffiti, litter and beer bottles (yeah yeah - welcome to Germany!) - I felt the first drops of rain, which had arrived another hour earlier even than the revised forecast. It seemed that I was in for a wet ride!
Initially the rain didn't amount to much as I headed out of Potsdam for the second time, south-westwards along the lake shore, with an inland gravel detour to add a few more metres of elevation. This took me to my favourite part of the ride, the 3km forest track ascending to the Wietkiekenberg, the highest "summit" of the day at a dizzying 125m! "Gravel" is a slightly optimistic description of the track - the surface is mostly soft earth and tree litter, generally nice to ride but with the occasional deep sandy spot where I had to dismount, and ascending steadily but gently with a few steeper bits. As it's not part of a major hiking route, there are usually very few people about, and today, with the dodgy weather, it was completely deserted - even the wolves and wild boar stayed away! I arrived at the radio tower at the top just as the rain really began in earnest - luckily there was a covered picnic table where I could retreat to enjoy the rest of my coffee and buns.
Just as I was leaving, a bedraggled pair of hikers arrived, dressed in full rain capes and carrying soggy-looking camping gear, and took my place in the rain shelter. I wished them a good day, then headed down another trail into the lakeside village of Ferch, which allowed me to climb back up again on the adjacent road and regain most of the height!
The next phase of the ride was pretty tiresome due to the rain, the fairly flat and "samey" forest terrain, the motorway which constrained my route choices (due to limited crossing points) and taking a wrong turning which, annoyingly, added distance without adding much elevation. Also, I was now running quite a long way behind schedule and I didn't really have the energy, or the motivation ("Bock" as they say in German), to try to push the speed.
Luckily, the rain stopped and the sun came out just as I came to a pair of Mirabellen trees in full fruit, which Caroline and I had noticed when we passed the same spot on a ride a few days previously. This time I happened to have an empty lunch box with me, so of course I stopped and filled it with the small yellow damson-like fruits, as well as eating quite a few of them straight from the tree to supplement my picnic rations. Delicious! Although the 20mins or so spent on fruit picking put me even further behind my planned schedule, but I didn't really care any more at this point! Lunch would wait!
Those Mirabellen trees marked the transition from forest to the famous Werder fruit growing area - so famous it even has its own dedicated bike route, the "Panoramaweg Werderobst", part of which my route followed - through orchards covering low hills to the south-west of the small town of Werder; although the highest point was in fact given over not to orchards but a huge maize field, topped by a solitary wind turbine.
My route continued northwards, skirting the Plessower See (which has become one of our favourite local lakes for stand up paddling, see for instance https://storyteller.fit/story/7460 ) and reaching the village of Phöben, where I headed up to the transmitter at the top of Wachtelberg - whose name comes not from "Wachtel" (quail, the bird) but from "Wache" (a watch or lookout). Then there was a quick circuit round the hill adjoining the Werder Stadtpark, before heading eastwards and homewards across the river Havel again.
Still not quite home and dry yet, though, because I had a few last summits to "bag" on my way home through the suburbs of Golm and Eiche: the Reiherberg (68m) - "Heron Hill", sadly deserted by its colony of herons since a large landfill site was developed nearby; Kleiner & Grosser Herzberg (67m and 73m respectively, although I couldn't find a path leading all the way to the top of the latter); and, last of all, Windmühlenberg (75m) - "Windmill Hill" - which turned out to be crowned not by a picturesque old mill, but by a structure resembling a large modern warehouse. For the second time on this route it seemed an odd thing to find at the highest point of a hill; I wondered whether it is a reservoir/waterworks, or some military installation.
Unfortunately the trail to get me down off the hill in the right direction for home lay on the opposite side of that compound, and to get to it I had to fight my way around the edge of the fence, negotiating a couple of fallen trees on the way, and worrying about picking up ticks from the long grass - I've already had a couple of them this summer.
My bike - and my legs - had got thoroughly plastered in damp sandy dirt during the off-road sections, and I needed to hose them down with the garden hose when I got home; but it almost wasn't necessary, because I got caught in a torrential deluge just in the last couple of kilometres before home; I'd have escaped it if I hadn't been held up getting down off Windmühlenberg! Once snug and dry in the house, I faced an agonising wait for my Strava trace to upload, and see if I had to go back out again to collect a few more metres for the thousand ... high fives with Caroline when the four figures came up, a quick shower, then time for a celebratory glass of bubbly before a hearty restorative lunch.
* Wikipedia only lists the Hagelberg as third highest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hills_of_Brandenburg but we are happy to accept the claim of Hagelberg as at least "equal highest" as there are only a few centimetres in it; and the so-called "highest hill" doesn't even have its summit actually within Brandenburg!
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