The Harz, Part IV: Snowed In a Treehouse

Jerry Griffis

5 days ago

3 min read

On March 31 we checked out of our hotel in Wernigerode and headed southwest, with a brown wooden church along the way and a night in a treehouse at the end of it.

The Stave Church at Hahnenklee

The Gustav-Adolf-Stabkirche, a dark brown wooden stave church with layered shingled roofs and a tall spire

This is the Gustav-Adolf-Stabkirche in Hahnenklee, a borough of Goslar, so we were back near the Rammelsberg. A Stabkirche is a "stave church", a wooden church built around upright posts (staves), and this one is a copy of the medieval Borgund stave church in Norway. The architect, Karl Mohrmann, had visited Borgund and believed stave churches had once been common in medieval Saxon lands. Construction began in 1907, and it was consecrated on June 28, 1908, during Hahnenklee's boom as a spa town and tourist destination.

It was built from spruce cut on the nearby Bocksberg, and apart from a few hidden parts like the planking and roof, it uses no nails or screws. It is named for King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden. Inside, the windows look like portholes, the chandelier is a replica of a ship's steering wheel, and there are carved snakes and dragons that recall the time of Christianization. The tower even has a carillon (a set of bells played from a keyboard) with 49 bronze bells.

An ornate carved wooden church door painted salmon and blue with iron fittings, under a carved wooden porch

The church door has painted decoration and wrought-iron fittings. Hahnenklee, by the way, is one of the 20 or so places around the Harz that light fires on Walpurgisnacht.

Into the Solling

From there we drove southwest to the Solling, a forested hill region near Uslar, in Lower Saxony. It was cloudy and wet, and the villages we passed through looked like they had been there forever.

A narrow stream channel running through a village between gardens and half-timbered houses

Half-timbered and brick houses on a village street under a gray sky

A Treehouse for the Night

We stayed at the Baumhaushotel Solling ("treehouse hotel") at In der Loh in Uslar, in the Solling-Vogler Nature Park. The treehouses are built of local untreated wood and stand several meters up in the forest. They are heated and open all year, which is a good thing, because it was cold.

Waiting for Dinner

That evening we went down into the nearest village, Schönhagen, now part of Uslar, so we could eat. The place we'd picked, the Gasthaus Zur Harburg (a Gasthaus is a "guest house", the German country inn with a restaurant), wasn't open yet, so we wandered around the village for about two hours in the cold, wet wind, with people staring at us out of their windows. Eventually they let us in. I don't think they were really serving yet, but they fed us anyway, and we were very, very happy about it.

A person with a black umbrella standing on a muddy farm track in the rain, with two more people with umbrellas in the distance

The walk back to the treehouse started in rain, with umbrellas, and somewhere along the way it turned to snow. By the time we got back it was completely dark.

A lit window of our treehouse glowing orange in the dark forest at night

For some reason none of us took a single photo of the treehouses in daylight.

Snowed In

In the morning everything was white, and the bathrooms were a walk away through the snow, which was cold. With that much snow we didn't think anyone would bring breakfast up to us, but they did, and we were very thankful. After breakfast we left, and the ride out of the mountains was a bit hectic, with the car sliding all over the road.

The trip started here: The Harz, Part I: A Thousand Years Underground.

The trip continues on the North Sea coast: Bremerhaven and Cuxhaven: The Cold North Sea.

Possum et ego.