Where the Volcano Sleeps – Photohike Ettringen
- Lars-Henrik Roth
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
The volcanic Eifel does not look like a volcano. Those who come here expecting traces of fire, ash and visible violence find instead: forest, spring blossoms, peaceful paths, a few moss-covered rocks. All beautiful. All quiet. All made of material that once burned. A search.
I. The Desk
I was tidying my desk when a magazine caught my eye. Die Eifel. I flicked through it — and stopped. An article about the Ulmener Maar, that almost perfectly circular depression in the Volcanic Eifel. Formed some 11,000 years ago. The most recent eruption in the region.
Geologically: yesterday.
I read on, and images began to form behind my eyes: glowing lava pushing downhill. Pyroclastic flows incinerating everything before any living thing could grasp what was coming. The ruins of Pompeii. Ash settling over valleys like a silence too heavy to lift. Where had I ever seen traces like that in the Eifel?
I closed the magazine. Went online.
The Sandkaul Caves — I had driven past them countless times without stopping — lie at the foot of the Hochstein. A volcanic cone that erupted exactly once, around 200,000 years ago. Since then, it sleeps. The rock: porous tuff.
The tuff from which many old Eifel farmhouses are built is cooled ash. Cooled ash. The ground beneath our feet is ash. The walls of the houses are ash. The foundations of the fields are ash.
One question pressed forward: Can you still see the traces of that violence? In the volcanic Eifel, the most recent known eruption — the Ulmener Maar — lies a mere 11,000 years in the past. Geologically, a blink. The world as we know it had not yet begun.
I noted the Photohike for the 2nd of May.
II. Arrival and First Disappointment
It was still almost dark when I reached the car park. The last of the twilight lay over the landscape like breath that had not yet decided to leave. I walked toward the caves. Black as pitch, the openings gaped in the porous stone.
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I waited for the feeling of latent danger.
Depth. Age. Some trace of what had once been here.
None of it came. Instead I knelt down and reached out my hand. The rock was so porous my fingers almost sank into it — like a firm sponge. Cold for millennia. I bent lower and squeezed myself into the cave with all my gear. It was not deep — short, interconnected passages. Suddenly all colour was gone. Everything grey: grey walls, grey grit on the floor. I was on the moon.
Fascinating. But not shattering.
Then came the sun. Not hesitant, not with the long softness you hope for at that hour of the morning. It was like a light switch. Hard, direct — and what had looked black and gaping a moment before became ordinary. I raised the camera. I tried to compose the openings into a frame. Nothing. The rock looked like rock. The hole looked like a hole. What made it all so fascinating — that feeling in the fingers, that thought of ash — could not be photographed.
I put the camera away. I walked up.
The climb to the Hochstein was steep and short. Before I entered the forest, I shot a panorama. A peaceful, cultivated landscape. No Iceland. No Tierra del Fuego. No Pompeii.
In the forest: birdsong on every side. A hill that still holds the outline of a volcanic cone within it, but has long buried its history beneath vegetation and humus.
Time had done its tidying here.
Then the Genoveva Cave. Orderly, touristy, no mystery. Just beyond it, the first real tuff rock faces rose over the path — and for a moment the stone was more than backdrop. I stopped, turned my gaze to the rock wall. Also here: no trace of fire.
Then forest again. Blossoms. Birdsong.
A beautiful walk, I thought. Really beautiful. But no real encounter with what I had come looking for.
III. Marxe Ley
Then a fork appeared. A small sign: Marxe Ley.
At first this path too was a spring path. Green light through young leaves, damp earth, the smell of growth. Then something shifted. The path dropped suddenly into depth. Boulders pushed up through the ground. Tree roots clawed into the tuffstone — not as ornament, but as struggle. The path narrowed. The walls closed in.
And then I stood in the basin of the old Marxe Ley quarry.
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No light was wasted here. The steep tuff walls let almost nothing of the sky through. It was cool, damp, still — a different stillness from the forest outside. Even the birds were silent.
And on the walls: the structure of the deposits. Visible, distinct, in horizontal layers. Eruption upon eruption, ash upon ash, each layer a moment no one witnessed. Compressed, overlaid, hardened into stone.
I looked up. At the rim of the basin, high above all these layers: a thin strip of earth. Humus. From down here it became visible how impossibly thin the layer of life above the old ash really is.
Where the air had once glowed, it was now cool and damp. Where ash had fallen, scorching heat had stood, and volcanic material had settled layer by layer, fern and moss now grew.
I stood for a while. Then I walked back out.
IV. Signs on the Return
The story had revealed itself to me for a moment, only to show me the harmlessness of the present once more.
Back on the forest paths: walls of tuff, again and again. More small quarries that had laid the rock bare, long since reclaimed by moss and lichen. The layers were still legible here. They had my attention now.
Then the Erlenbrunnen. Water welling from the earth — rust-red, with a mineral shimmer at its source. Iron-rich water that carries its origin in its colour. I drank. It tasted aromatic.
Directly behind it: a bog. Boardwalks over dark water, reeds on both sides. Another world, for a few minutes.
Up again, forest again. And then, close to the path: a millstone. Large, broken, moss-covered, half sunk into the ground. Puzzling how it came to be here. An old route once passed over the Hochstein — perhaps the stone cracked in transit, a single fracture, and what had been value became waste. People had made basalt into millstones and grinding stones — the ancient violence beneath the ground, transformed into a tool. They did not know its origin.
V. Return and Close
By the time I reached the car park, the sun was high. The light was unrelenting. The Sandkaul Caves, which in the early twilight had looked so black and deep, now resembled an adventure playground. Walkers arrived with children. Someone pulled a stone from the ground, looked at it briefly — and slipped it into their pocket.
I stood before them and looked. These small, harmless openings in the slope. A landscape that presents itself like a pleasant afternoon. No menace. No sign.
Ettringen does not unsettle because it looks dangerous. It unsettles because it does not. The photographs show forest, light, rust-red spring water, a peaceful path. Everything has taken form, everything grows, everything lives. But the material from which this forest grew is ash. The rock beneath this humus is cooled violence. The spring filters through layers laid down by fire and ash. The millstone in the forest was once molten lava.
The Ulmener Maar lies thirty kilometres away. The most recent eruption in the Eifel — and geologists do not speak of it only in the past tense. The volcanoes are not cold. They sleep. After three generations, humanity forgets.
The past has not vanished. It has become material: soil, rock, path, spring, forest, humus, blossom, millstone.
Nothing suggests that, deep beneath my feet, an ancient power still sleeps.
The photographs reflect the serenity. The video momentarily recalls the fire.
AI-generated visualization, conceptualized by the author.
Service Information
🌟 Highlights
The Sandkaul Caves in early light – not deep caverns, but a strong entry into the theme: porous tuff, dark openings, first disappointment, first question.
Marxe Ley – the strongest place of the Photohike: a hidden old quarry, cool tuff walls, visible layers, and the moment when the landscape suddenly becomes legible.
Erlenbrunnen – rust-red, iron-rich water as a quiet geological sign in the forest.
Roots over tuff – one of the key images of the walk: life growing over volcanic material.
The millstone on the Hochstein – a silent cultural trace: basalt, human labour, fracture, loss of value, and return to the forest.
The volcanic landscape from the Hochstein – peaceful Eifel distance as a closing image: a landscape that shows no threat, and lingers precisely because of that.
📷 Photo Tips Along the Way
Start early: The Sandkaul Caves are far more atmospheric before sunrise and in the last traces of dawn than in hard daylight.
Do not wait for spectacle: This route is not about dramatic craters or grand vistas, but about small geological signs: tuff, layers, porous rock, springs, roots.
Use the ultra-wide angle deliberately: In caves, hollow paths and quarries, a low perspective works well. Get close to the stone so that space, confinement and material become tangible.
Watch the hard contrasts: Once the sun is up, bright highlights and deep shadows appear quickly. Expose carefully for the brighter areas and let the darkness remain part of the image.
Look for details with the telephoto lens: Layers in the tuff, lichen, roots, moss, mineral-coloured water and the millstone often work better as compressed details than as wide scenes.
Give Marxe Ley time: Do not just pass through. The place needs a few minutes before its layers, coolness and silence begin to unfold.
💡 Special Tip
At first glance, this route feels less spectacular than its geological story suggests. That is exactly why it is worth letting go of expectation. Anyone looking only for volcanic drama may be disappointed. But if you begin to read the material — porous tuff, rust-red water, roots in stone, a thin layer of humus above old ash — you discover a landscape whose real tension lies beneath its peaceful surface.
🏆 Photohike Rating: Ettringen
Category | Rating (1-10) | Comment |
Photographic Value | 8.4 | Several strong individual images, especially forest light, Marxe Ley, Sandkaul, roots over tuff and the final volcanic landscape. No spectacular hero spot, but a very good visual foundation for a narrative series. |
Motif Density | 7.8 | The route has clear highlights, but also longer forest sections and smaller, understated quarries. Not every part carries the same photographic weight. |
Experience Value | 8.2 | A beautiful and varied walk; as a Photohike, it becomes especially strong through its inner depth. Its real effect comes from expectation, disappointment and later recognition. |
Accessibility / Safety | 8.1 | Generally manageable, but with steeper sections, narrow paths, hollow ways and uneven ground. Solid hiking shoes and sure-footedness are recommended. |
Overall Impression | 8.3 | Not a classic spectacle hike, but a quiet, mature Photohike about hidden geology, peaceful surfaces and the question of what landscapes no longer show. |
🔗 Explore More
Photohiking means: walking, seeing, telling. Learn more — and discover many more tours — on photohikers.de/en.
➡️ All Photohike image series can be found on Flickr.
© Lars-Henrik Roth / Wanderspezi – the Photohiker. Texts and images in this article are protected by copyright. Any use without prior permission is prohibited. Time travel video produced with generative AI based on the author's original concept.
