Berchtesgaden
Germany's only alpine national park — the Watzmann's mile-high east face, the fjord-dark Königssee, and a valley slowly drowning in mountain rubble.
Berchtesgaden, declared in 1978, is Germany's only high-alpine national park: a horseshoe of limestone ranges — Watzmann, Steinernes Meer, Hoher Göll, Hochkalter — pushed hard against the Austrian border, rising from lake level at 600 metres to the Watzmann's 2,713-metre summit. The Watzmann's east face, eighteen hundred metres of wall falling almost straight into the Königssee, is the biggest rock face in the Eastern Alps; a local mountain guide, Johann Grill "Kederbacher", first climbed it in 1881, and it still kills the underprepared with grim regularity.
The Königssee is the park's aorta: a glacial trench of a lake, green-black and fjord-narrow, plied since 1909 by silent electric boats whose skippers still stop mid-lake to play a trumpet at the echo wall. At the far shore stands St. Bartholomä, the red-domed pilgrimage chapel under the east face; beyond the lake-head at Salet, a short walk reaches the Obersee and the Röthbach falls, at some 470 metres Germany's highest. West of the Watzmann runs the park's strangest landscape — the Wimbachgries, a valley being buried alive under dolomite rubble that pours off the flanking walls, entered through the slot of the Wimbachklamm.
This is chamois, golden eagle, and alpine salamander country, grazed lightly by the alp-farming that predates the park by a millennium; Berchtesgaden town below has mined salt since 1517.
What's worth knowing before you go
Berchtesgaden town is the hub — rail from Munich via Freilassing, or the frequent bus from Salzburg, then local buses to Schönau's boat dock, the Jenner cable car, and the Hintersee. The Haus der Berge in town is among the best national-park centres in the Alps. Boats run most of the year, but the mountain routes — above all the two-day Watzmann traverse — belong to high summer, and huts book out months ahead for August.
The connoisseur's hour is early at the Eiskapelle: an easy walk from St. Bartholomä to the lowest-lying perennial ice in the Alps, a snow-dome cave at the very foot of the east face — best in morning cold, and never entered, since the vault sheds car-sized blocks.