2009-03-22 48 8

Location

The hash is in a forest area near Deckenpfronn, in the Oberes Gäu hills.

Expedition by Ekorren

I hadn't planned to visit that hash. Rather, I had planned to get some things done at home, get up early the next morning, and do a well planned trip which among other destinations, would lead to a hashpoint far away. With time passing, and the weather forecast getting more precise and reliable, the chance that that trip was feasible got lower, though - rather, the forecast expected sunday to be the last dry and partly sunny day for some time, and a storm coming up on monday. Getting more and more sure that monday's trip had to be cancelled, I finally decided to go anyway.

I had to expect no snow! Well, I had believed that a number of times before, but this time it was probably for sure. The route would neither lead up to more than about 600 m above sea level, nor into any deep valley where the sun never touches the ground. Also, this was to be a rather comfortable ride into an area where I haven't been very often before.

When I finally got on my way, the wind had gotten stronger (up to 4 Bft, actually), and, coming from west to northwest, would be headwind most of the time. Since wind is usually weaker in valleys and between buildings, I tried to keep away from the hilltops, which was practically impossible. Anyway, I took the lowest possible route up along the small Ammer river to Herrenberg. For some reason, for some part that would even be a trail I had only taken once before - in dense fog, that is. It was interesting to actually see something this time instead of just trying to keep on the way. And to find that I had hit a wrong intersection that time and taken a small unintended detour without really noticing.

From Herrenberg there was no further valley I could follow, so, no matter what wind or slopes suggested, it was going over the hills. I took a short detour to actually get a glance of Hash Village, but it turned out to be nothing special, neither provided any opened place to buy a small bit of food, so I soon went for the forest where the hash should be. It was easy to get there, only a few metres off a track named "deep pits way". There was nothing special around the hash.

Still, researching geocaches nearby I found one only 280 m from the hash, pointing to something to see nearby: The pits the track was named after, actually.

Those hills are built of rather soft limestone which, in a course of thousands and millions of years, gets partly dissolved by underground water streams, building large caves. And from time to time, it may happen that a cave collapses, leaving a large hole in the ground. Such pits are called dolines (or, more general, sinkholes), and smaller ones are a quite common sight in my region. Here, there was a particularily impressing one of those: a 15 m deep cone-shaped pit in the middle of a forest. The trees actually didn't mind the pit so it was impossible to make a decent photo.

Having visited that, I got on my way back on another route, cursing bike trails planned after the "we don't care where you really get to as long as you just leave that road and vanish from the sight of car drivers" principle. Collected one more geocache, ignored dozens of probably boring micro caches, and, after reaching the Ammer valley again, taking advantage of the wind and gentle slopes that had slowed me down on the way to the hash, got home before sunset.

I almost had forgotten how convenient such a trip may be even in hill terrain if you don't get stuck in snow, mud, or on an ice covered slope every few metres.