National Park Kellerwald-Edersee in February

End of February we decided we needed a long weekend somewhere in nature… and chose the National Park Kellerwald-Edersee, which is about 2 hours north of where we live. We have driven past this area numerous times on the way to our relatives in the North and back, but never found the time for a stop-over…

On Friday, we arrived early so we could have a beautiful long photo walk in the Urwald Sababurg, an old pastoral forest, in which one tends to find old gnarly strangely formed beech or oak trees. Of course, end of February we had no new leaves yet, and there was no fog or snow, but we had beautiful sunshine 🙂

Afterwards we drove from there to our hotel, the beautiful and romantic old castle „Hotel Schloss Waldeck“… which was our base for 3 days:

Saturday, we went for a hike along the „Knorreichenstieg“, the Gnarly Oaks Path, which was a 10 km hike, with the most interesting part being a 2 km ridge line where the gnarly oaks are living… Again, no special weather conditions, grey sky, with only occasional sun peaking through… We have to come back here at different times of the year, but still it was a beautiful walk:

On Sunday morning, we were greeted by a wonderful view from our hotel terrace and breakfast restaurant:

What a start (besides the wonderful breakfast itself)… today we would go for a 11 km hike on the south side of the Edersee, around a mountain called Traddelkopf. On this walk we had full sunshine, which made for harshly backlit photographs facing south, and shadowy forest on the north side of the mountain. Fitting those different lighting conditions, the forest was looking completely different as well on the different sides of the mountain: