One of the starting points for the hike up the mountain is Veen, situated in a flat, lush area between two lakes. The landscape here is an end moraine – that is, deposits of sand and gravel left behind from when the glaciers melted away around 12,000 years ago.
The higher you climb, the more of the solid rock comes into view. Here, the bedrock consists of gneiss with a characteristic striped appearance, known as foliation, which dips gently eastwards all the way to the summit.
This gneiss was originally part of a large granite mass that was compressed and stretched deep within the Earth’s crust, at the roots of an enormous mountain range, around 1,000 million years ago. All the bedrock you see from the summit belongs to this zone.
Back then, a mountain range the size of the Himalayas towered here, and the gneiss you are standing on today lay tens of kilometres below the surface. Through slow uplift and erosion, these deep layers have been exposed – like the roots of a mountain range, not unlike what we find beneath the Himalayas today.
- Access: County Road FV503
- Parking: Veen Camping
