Camping on the E-Paths
(Without getting arrested)
I’m planning my next section-hike down the E10, as I work my way southward from Berlin, and by far the most difficult part of the plan has been finding places to pitch my tent for the night. “Wild” camping isn’t permitted in Germany, and so my options for places to stay a night are more limited than in (for example) Scandinavia. But there are options, and I’ve learned a few ways to find overnights that aren’t immediately obvious, so I thought it would be helpful to put those experiences together into a sort of how-to guide for through-hiking along trails that weren’t really built for through-hiking.
Through-Hiking vs. Pilgrimage
One of the key distinctions between how the E-Paths seem to be organized in Germany relative to other “wilderness” hiking trails is that these trails aren’t really conceived as a wilderness trail at all, but more of a walking route akin to a pilgrim’s path. Europe is covered with branches of the Saint James Way (Jakobsweg in German; Camino de Santiago in Spanish), all converging on Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. These are ancient walking routes, centuries old, and the infrastructure around them includes hostels, towns with markets, churches and chapels and monasteries, and other amenities that enable the pilgrim to make the journey carrying very little of their own.
Consequently, I think the way the E-Paths are conceived, at least here in Germany, would be familiar to a pilgrim: it’s more expected that you would be stopping for the night at some hostel, and eating your meals in dining halls, rather than living out of a backpack for months on end. The idea of building a long-distance hiking trail equipped with bivouac sites—relatively naturalistic, with a compost toilet, a picnic bench, and maybe a lean-to shelter and a rainwater cistern at most—is something I’ve only found on a few trails in Germany (the Forststeig, on the German-Czech border, was explicitly built with these amenities to emulate the hiking experience of the better-known Scandinavian hiking paradises).
It’s also worth mentioning that there’s almost nowhere in western or central Europe that’s as lightly inhabited as the wilder parts of the Scandinavian or American wilderness. Even when I was deep in the woods on the Forststeig, I was never more than an hour’s walk from some town with shops and a bus stop. There’s no real need for wilderness shelters here because there’s almost no deep wilderness to be found.
Hiking along the Edge of Civilization
There are a few options, though, for when you’re trying to through-hike an E-Path and don’t want to stay in someplace civilized every night. One of the notable parts of my experience hiking these trails has been that I always feel like I’m hiking along the edge of civilization, without exactly being in it. I pass through, or along the edges, but then continue off along a path between some hedges, or across some pasture, and fade into the landscape again.
But to put up my tent for the night, I have to be a bit creative. So far, for this stretch along the E10, I’ve found a few options:
Bivouac Sites and Wasserwanderrastplätze
The countryside around Berlin, as it is mostly sandy and barely above the waterline, is covered by a network of canals, rivers, lakes, and small waterways. Since there’s a lot of paddle tourism here, there are a lot of Wasserwanderrastplätze (“Water-wandering-rest-places”) that turn out to be about the same as the campsites you’d expect from a wilderness hiking trail. These are usually publicly managed, though a few of them are private.
Likewise, there are also bivouac sites specifically for camping along the trail, though these are rarer in this part of Germany. For finding both, I’ve learned that calling the local tourism offices is the most reliable way to find out where the sites are, and who runs them.
Private Campgrounds
These, with a few exceptions for the smaller ones that I found quite enjoyable, tend to be large grassy parking lots with utility and sanitation hookups for camper vans. I enjoy these the least of all my possible overnights, because they tend to be crowded in the summer, and expensive (“expensive” for me is relative, but €15-€20 a night will add up fast if you’re hiking for months).
Call a Farmer
One of the things I’ve had to learn, and which I actually really enjoy, is that it’s usually not difficult to find a family farm along the route you’re hiking, call the owners, and ask to put up a tent on the grounds for a night. I did this for two of my overnights on Rügen, and both times the owners were extremely friendly (the first also gave me a bucket of fresh water, and said I could shelter in the trailer he had set up near the camping spot if I needed. That was on my third night on Rügen, and it was quite nice.
Obviously, it’s not always going to work out (I didn’t have the same luck for this upcoming section, because the farms in the area were mostly for livestock, or organic farms that didn’t want people camping in the fields), but it’s a nice way to meet people along the route.
Please Do Not Incur the Wrath of the Forest Service
Lastly, there is some information available for “wild camping,” but I honestly wouldn’t recommend trying it in Germany. For one, there just aren’t that many suitable spots for doing it along the E-Paths: you’re almost always out in the open, along paths or roads that are frequently used, and pass between farms, towns, and tourist spots. If you get caught, it can be a hefty fine. You can technically put down a tent for the night if it’s an emergency and the weather is bad, but I’ve found it’s generally not worth the effort.
To hike the Forststeig, you have to pay €10 for each overnight, regardless of whether it’s in a cabin or one of the campsites. For all the amenities you have, I think that’s well worth it. My costs for overnights along the E10 on Rügen ended up being about the same—two nights were free because they were on farms, three nights were €15 each because they were private campgrounds—and that seems like a reasonable expense in exchange for being able to use a bath-house for hot showers and have a supply of fresh water.
There are good reasons not to try wild camping here, too. In the off-season, there’s usually forestry work, and often hunters out, so it’s not entirely safe to be out in the woods overnight.
I know there are some Youtubers and bloggers out there who post guides for how to sneak a wild camp in while evading the notice of the authorities, but honestly I don’t think it’s worth it (unless doing things you’re not supposed to is appealing in itself). The wardens and rangers I called planning my next hike were all very helpful, and were happy to grant me access to the bivouac sites in their districts, even though they were “technically” closed for the season (in contrast to the private campgrounds, which were unwilling to let me pitch a tent there in the off-season). You’ll have a better time, and feel better about it, working out solutions with public servants (whom I have always found to be very solicitous and helpful).
Finding Campsites
What really helped me in my planning was the OpenCamping website, which has a fairly comprehensive map of all the different campgrounds and bivouac sites in Germany (as well as other countries, though I haven’t really checked them yet). A lot of regional park services are also really helpful: for my upcoming hike along the E10 through Austria in the spring, the tourism office for Upper Austria is sending me a map that marks all the camping spots in the region as well (their advice, as was also the case with the tourism office on Rügen, was to look for farms along the way and give them a call).
Project Goal: Build More Bivouac Sites
The more I hike along these trails, the more I think that it would be nice to have more of the bivouac sites specifically along the E-Paths, for through-hikers like me to have spots at semi-regular intervals to put up a tent for the night.
Scandinavia, and the Parc naturel régional des Ballons des Vosges (a beautiful park in Alsace-Lorraine, where I went on a five-day hike around 2011), and a few other countries in Europe have small shelters set up in the wilderness areas for this reason, and it makes hiking there much easier to plan, and much more pleasant an experience (though, to be fair, for a couple nights on my hike in les Ballons I camped in cow pastures).
I want to imagine that it shouldn’t be too expensive to set something like that up as a regular feature of the E-Paths, but one of the things I’ve come to realize as I’ve talked with the ERA (the umbrella organization for the E-Paths) is that it wouldn’t be enough simply to clear out some brush at some spot along the trail, set up a picnic bench and a box for a trail log. Building sites is only the first step, and it’s the ongoing maintenance of those sites that is the major obstacle. Somebody in the local or regional government would need to devote resources to keeping the sites clear and in good order on an ongoing basis, and I don’t think it’s clear to any of the local authorities that this is something with a high level of public demand.
So maybe that’s something that this hiking blog should be working toward: getting more people able and willing to hike the E-Paths as through-hikes to make use of the trail network on the European continent, rather than traveling to Scandinavia, New Zealand, or the US for the trails there. There’s already an excellent start with the Forststeig: it was deliberately made with those other trails in mind, and is very successful.1 The more people there are out hiking these trails and publicizing them, the more they become known, and the more incentive there is for local authorities to improve and expand them.
My next hike along the E10 is from Groß Köris to Burg (Spreewald), which is an eighty-kilometer section and mostly through wildlife preserves, along waterways, and occasionally through towns or alongside farmland. None of the local tourism offices had ever heard of somebody doing a hike like this in winter (temperatures over that weekend are predicted to stay below freezing, so it’s a somewhat … sporting hike due to the season as well).
This is going to be my first section hike where I’ll be staying at bivouac sites along the trail, so I’ll be able to report on them when I come back. If they’re as nice as they look in the tourist brochures the local governments helpfully sent me, then perhaps they can serve as a successful moder for building more of them, as I make my way down-trail toward Czechia.
I’m getting farther and farther away from Berlin, so the trips to get to the trailhead and back home are taking longer, in turn commending multi-night sections rather than individual day-hikes. The trail, and my journey along it, is stretching out and expanding the more progress I make.
Statistics for the recently ended season haven’t been published yet, but I recall a forest ranger on my hike last year saying that ten thousand hikers a year was the average number (which went up significantly during the first couple years of the Covid pandemic as people sought relief from the lockdowns by heading out into the woods).