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| State: | Baden-Württemberg |
| Counties: | Waldshut, Lörrach |
| Region: | Hotzenwald |
The Hotzenwald is a landscape and region in the Southern Black Forest in the county of Waldshut. Its headquarters was the Waldvogteiamt.
| Location | |
|---|---|
| | |
| State: | Baden-Württemberg |
| Counties: | Waldshut, Lörrach |
| Region: | Hotzenwald |
The Hotzenwald is a landscape and region in the Southern Black Forest in the county of Waldshut. Its headquarters was the Waldvogteiamt.
The region of Hotzenwald is not precisely defined in the records. In a narrower sense the Hotzenwald is the southernmost region of the Southern Black Forest, bounded in the west roughly by the Wehra, in the north approximately by the upper reaches of the Alb River near St. Blasien, in the east by the hill ridge between the Alb and Schlücht rivers, and in the south by the High Rhine and Klettgau rivers. This definition of the Hotzenwald more or less covers the same area as the territory of the former County of Hauenstein.
In a wider sense, other regions may be counted as part of the Hotzenwald that were linked to St. Blaise Abbey or the County of Hauenstein, both of which were historically important in the Southern Black Forest. These additional areas include, for example, the parish of Gersbach (Schopfheim), which was first mentioned in 1166 by the gift of a church to St Blaise Abbey. This parish lies immediately northwest of the Wehra. Others include the regions in the northwest as far as the middle and upper reaches of the Wiese river and in the east to the hill ridge between Schlücht and Steina rivers.
Whichever definition is used, the region mainly covers the central and high areas of the Southern Black Forest. It climbs rapidly from the level of the High Rhine (about 300 m above sea level (NN) ) up to heights of 500 to over 1,000 m above NN across the majority of the area. The region drops from the summits of the Southern Black Forest in the north to the High Rhine in the south and is characterised by sunny plateaux and high valleys.
The rivers in the Hotzenwald generally form high valleys in their upper reaches and cut deeply into the basement of the Black Forest rocks in their lower reaches. They follow the downslope of the Southern Black Forest from north to south before emptying into the Rhine as right-hand tributaries. The main rivers in the Hotzenwald region, from west to east, are the Wiese, Wehra, Murg, Alb, and Schlücht.
The parishes in the heart of the region are Rickenbach, Herrischried, Dachsberg and Görwihl.
The oldest rocks occurring in the Hotzenwald are gneisses and migmatites, which were formed in the Palaeozoic era. The largest part of the Hotzenwald is the granite countryside between Bernau and Bad Säckingen. The granite rocks that occur here are, according to research, up to 335 million years old. [1] Other elements of the terrain are granite porphyry and lamprophyre. Near Laufenburg, the Kleiner Laufen rapids broke through the basement; today they are impounded.
In the eastern and southeastern Hotzenwald platform rocks cover the basement. According to field research in the area of Waldshut/Dogern this layer of bunter sandstone is an average of 15 metres thick and divided into three elements: the upper stratum of 8 metre thick Röt clays; beneath it a roughly 5 metre thick sandstone layer mixed with carnelian (the Carnelian horizon); and, at the bottom, above the basement, a roughly 2.5-metre-thick stratum of Mühl sandstone. [1]
During the Würm glaciation the Alb valley glacier covered the Hotzenwald from the north to just before Görwihl. The extent of the Black Forest Glacier of the Riß glaciation is no longer precisely known today, but it appears to have extended from the north as well as far as Hottingen. The finds from the Alpine gravels of the Riß ice age indicate that the glacier flowed from the Alps to a point north of Waldshut-Tiengen. A confluence of the Black Forest Glacier and the Alpine Glacier is highly unlikely to have taken place. [1]
After the ice age the Hotzenwald region experienced a tundra climate. There is evidence of beech being the dominant species of tree up to 600 B. C.. In addition, grain pollen, which dates to a similar period, is an indication of the first settlement of the Hotzenwald. Around 1,000 A. D. spruce superseded beech as the predominant tree species.
The raised bogs (Hochmoore) and transitional bogs (Übergangsmoore) especially in the Ibach/Dachsberg area, as a relic of the ice age, are home to a rich variety of species otherwise rare in the Black Forest such as bog-rosemary, mud sedge and fewflower sedge, rannoch-rush, alpine bulrush, white beak-sedge or purple coltsfoot. The European Arctic starflower has a strong presence in the Hotzenwald, which is also the only place in the whole of South Germany where the cross-leaved heath occurs naturally. [2] Especially in the first half of the 20th century, the forestry industry’s attempts at drainage drastically reduced the number of bogs. As a result, several bogs in the Hotzenwald were declared as nature reserves; in 1998 there were 10 of them. In addition, attempts have been made to regenerated some of the old bogs.
The forests in the Ibach/Dachsberg area and the Upper Forest (Oberwald) consist mainly of firs, beech and spruce. In the poorly drained hollows these are interrupted by bogs or spruce woods. In the second half of the 20th century, several areas of highland pasture were turned into forests. Likewise during this period, reforestation of the steep heads of the valleys, mountainsides and unused valley grasslands was begun. By contrast, the terraced slopes of the outer forests were largely cleared.
On the high pastures the winged greenweed plays an important role.
The Black Forest is a large forested mountain range in the state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. It is the source of the Danube and Neckar rivers.
Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald is a Landkreis (district) in the southwest of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Fifty towns and municipalities with 133 settlements lie within the district. The district itself belongs to the region of Freiburg with the region of Southern Upper Rhine.
Mer Bleue Bog is a 33.43 km2 (12.91 sq mi) protected area in Gloucester, Ontario, an eastern suburb of Ottawa in Eastern Ontario, Canada. Its main feature is a sphagnum bog that is situated in an ancient channel of the Ottawa River and is a remarkable boreal-like ecosystem normally not found this far south. Stunted black spruce, tamarack, bog rosemary, blueberry, and cottongrass are some of the unusual species that have adapted to the acidic waters of the bog.
Cranberry Glades—also known simply as The Glades—are a cluster of five small, boreal-type bogs in southwestern Pocahontas County, West Virginia, United States. This area, in the Allegheny Mountains at about 3,400 feet (1,000 m), is protected as the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area, part of the Monongahela National Forest. This site is the headwaters of the Cranberry River, a popular trout stream, and is adjacent to the nearly 50,000-acre (200 km2) Cranberry Wilderness.
The Palatinate Forest, sometimes also called the Palatine Forest, is a low-mountain region in southwestern Germany, located in the Palatinate in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The forest is a designated nature park covering 1,771 km2 and its highest elevation is the Kalmit.
Waldshut-Tiengen, commonly known as Waldshut, is a city in southwestern Baden-Württemberg right at the Swiss border. It is the district seat and at the same time the biggest city in Waldshut district and a "middle centre" in the area of the "high centre" Lörrach/Weil am Rhein to whose middle area most towns and communities in Waldshut district belong. There are furthermore complexities arising from cross-border traffic between this area and the Swiss cantons of Aargau, Schaffhausen and Zürich. This classification relates to Walter Christaller's Central Place Theory, however, and not to any official administrative scheme.
High Rhine is the name of the part of the Rhine between Lake Constance and the city of Basel, flowing in a general east-to-west direction and forming mostly the Germany–Switzerland border. It is the first of four named sections of the Rhine between Lake Constance and the river delta at the North Sea.
Albbruck is a municipality of the district of Waldshut in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is on the southwestern border of Germany with Switzerland.
Görwihl is a municipality in the district of Waldshut in Baden-Württemberg in Germany.
The Wutach is a river, 91 kilometres long, in the southeastern part of the Black Forest in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is a right-hand tributary of the Rhine. In its lower reaches it flows for about 6 kilometres along the border with the canton of Schaffhausen, Switzerland.
The Baden main line is a German railway line that was built between 1840 and 1863. It runs through Baden, from Mannheim via Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Offenburg, Freiburg, Basel, Waldshut, Schaffhausen and Singen to Konstanz. The Baden Mainline is 412.7 kilometres long, making it the longest route in the Deutsche Bahn network and also the oldest in southwest Germany. The section between Mannheim and Basel is the most important northern approach to the Swiss Alpine passes, whilst the section between Basel and Konstanz is only of regional significance. The stretch from Karlsruhe to Basel is also known as the Rhine Valley Railway (Rheintalbahn) and the Basel–Konstanz section as the High Rhine Railway (Hochrheinstrecke).
The Alb is a river in the southern Black Forest. It arises from two headwaters, the Menzenschwander Alb and Bernauer Alb, and flows in a southerly direction. It ends after 43.6 kilometres (27.1 mi) at a confluence with the High Rhine at Albbruck.
The Southern Black Forest Nature Park is located in Baden-Württemberg in Germany and covers an area of 394,000 hectares. As of 2018, it is Germany's largest nature park.
The Southern Black Forest is the highest part of the Black Forest, an area heavily transformed by ice age glaciation south of a line roughly from Freiburg im Breisgau to Donaueschingen. The term High Black Forest is not quite identical; that usually includes the highest part of the Central Black Forest, southeast of the Elz valley, as well. The Southern Black Forest Nature Park also takes in this area, extending across the whole of the High Black Forest as well as several peripheral areas.
The Alb Reservoir, or Alb Basin (Albbecken) is a storage reservoir in the valley of the River Alb near St. Blasien in the Southern Black Forest in south Germany. It is part of the pumped storage network of the Schluchseewerk based at Laufenburg and lies between the lake of Schluchsee and the Rhine near Waldshut. The barrier is a 28-metre-high gravity dam.
Menzenschwand is a climatic health spa in the Black Forest in Germany. The village lies within the borough of St. Blasien in the state of Baden-Württemberg.
The Mittelweg is a north–south long-distance path which runs through the Black Forest from Pforzheim to Waldshut. It is about 230 kilometres long and was established in 1903. Since then it has been maintained and sponsored by the Black Forest Club. Its waymark is a red diamond with a white bar on a white background.
The Hotzenwald Trail is a two-day, 46-kilometre-long hiking trail through the Southern Black Forest in Germany that runs from Schopfheim to Waldshut. The term Hotzenwald for the region through which the trail passes is derived from Joseph Victor von Scheffel's novel Der Trompeter von Säckingen. The hiking trail is sponsored and managed by the Black Forest Club. Its waymark is a white and black diamond on a yellow background.
47°39′N8°02′E / 47.650°N 8.033°E
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