Drents-Friese Wold
Depression-era forest and living drift sand on the Drenthe–Friesland border — the Kale Duinen still on the move, a brook unstraightened, and the first wolf pack in a century denned in the pines.
The Drents-Friese Wold is mostly a forest with a government signature. When the heaths here collapsed as farm commons around 1900, the state forestry service and work-relief programmes of the Depression planted pine by the square kilometre — men with spades, wages in food, whole villages employed at Appelscha — and the result grew into one of the largest continuous woodlands in the Netherlands, some six thousand hectares of it now inside the park. A century on, the plantations are being deliberately roughened: rows broken up, exotics thinned, dead wood left standing, and the straitjacketed little river Vledder Aa dug back into its own old meanders — the park is a long experiment in turning timber into wilderness.
Its wild heart, though, was never planted. The Aekingerzand — locally the Kale Duinen, the bald dunes — is living drift sand, one of the few places in Europe where inland sand still genuinely moves: crescents of bare quartz walking over the heath, kept alive by grazing sheep and by bulldozing the pioneer grass before it can nail the sand down. It is a desert with skylarks, specifically with woodlarks and tawny pipits on the warm bare ground, and in high summer the sand surface bakes while the bog pools of the Doldersummerveld heath a few kilometres south stand black and cool — the park's habitats run the entire moisture gradient from dune to quaking fen.
And then, in the 2020s, the headline nobody planned: wolves. After the species' return to the country over the German border, one of the first packs to settle and raise pups in the Netherlands denned in these woods — the park suddenly hosting the top predator the whole rewilding century had been implicitly preparing for. Encounters remain a statistical near-impossibility for walkers; the real change is in the deer, which move again like prey, and in the national argument, which the park now anchors whether it likes it or not.
What's worth knowing before you go
Appelscha is the gateway village, with the Buitencentrum at its forest edge and the Aekingerzand a short walk or ride away; Diever and Vledder serve the southern heaths. Assen and Steenwijk are the practical rail approaches, each with a bus onward. The essential route is the Kale Duinen loop at first light, when the sand carries the night's animal tracks like a register — after rain the crescents firm up and the walking is easiest. Late August gives heather on the Doldersummerveld; winter gives the pines their best silence. The connoisseur's detail: the sheepfold at the Aekingerzand still folds its flock nightly, and walking out with the shepherd's dusk return is the oldest traffic this landscape knows.