Freiburg (dpa / lsw) – The corona pandemic has triggered a hiking boom in the Black Forest. In the Black Forest National Park, around 100,000 more guests were out and about in the period from April to June 2020 than in the same period in the previous year, the park administration said. That is an increase of almost 50 percent. In some places, therefore, twice to three times as many day trippers were counted as in the same period of the previous year.
The figures for the months from July onwards have not yet been evaluated, but there is also a clear increase in visitors for this period. The basis for the assessment are counting barriers that have been set up in the national park since 2018.
What is certain is that snow and good weather also attracted many day trippers into nature at Christmas time. Popular destinations like the Dobel or the Mummelsee in the northern Black Forest and the Kandel near Freiburg experienced a real rush. In places there was traffic chaos on different days because parking lots were overcrowded. In some places, the police blocked the access roads in order to cope with the crowd. According to the Offenburg police, crowds of visitors are not unusual when there is snow in the Black Forest – it happens every year, said a spokesman.
Corona-related, however, was probably the rush of hikers. The region’s hiking guides and trail keepers noticed that there were many more people on the road in 2020 than before, said a spokesman for the Black Forest Association.
Anett Vonglatsamy, chairman of the Freiburg local group, told the dpa: “In the spring it was totally full outside.” The rush was also noticeable during the week, and paths that were otherwise less frequented were suddenly well attended. In autumn, the number of hikers had increased further. In their local association, the number of members also increased significantly in the Corona year 2020.
A hiking warden, who among other things takes care of the maintenance of the signposts, said that many hikers had asked her in the Freiburg city forest how to get to certain destinations. “This has not happened to me so often so far, maybe there are more” new “forest visitors on the way.”
According to the national park administration, the rush also had negative consequences. “The ranger team often had to admonish wild campers and dissolve larger societies,” it said. “In the parking lots in the national park, the mobile homes were sometimes close together.” How the animal world coped with the many visitors is not yet clear.
Disturbances caused by people away from the paths are particularly dangerous for the animals in the cold months, as they have to feed on their energy reserves during this time. In spring, many animals are prone to disturbances because they are busy breeding or rearing their young.
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