Diving into the day: a morning ritual at Lake Fohnsee

Diving into the day – my morning ritual during my stay at the campsite at Lake Fohnsee was a swim after sunrise. I’m still standing on the shore, admiring the panorama. The lake was still quiet then, before the waves from me and the other bathers destroyed the reflections on the almost perfectly smooth surface of the water.

The last of the night’s thunderstorms are moving away over the mountains of the Bavarian Prealps and the Wetterstein. Veils of mist drift across the lake because the water is still significantly warmer than the cool morning air. The pine forests remind me of Scandinavia, and in fact, the landscape here was also shaped by ice and glaciers, which gave the Scandinavian landscape its typical character.

Lake Fohnsee is part of the “Osterseen” nature reserve, an important ice-decay landscape consisting of marshy and nutrient-poor lakes, shore zones, meadows and forests. Towards the end of the last ice age, as the large glacier tongues from the Alpine region melted, individual blocks of ice, known as dead ice blocks, remained isolated and were covered by sediment. After these ice blocks melted, the resulting depressions filled with meltwater, rainwater and groundwater. This is how the bodies of water that we can marvel at today as “dead ice lakes” were created over a process lasting thousands of years.

That morning, I again encountered the three older women who meet every morning in summer at Lake Fohnsee to swim together in the lake. For the local residents from Iffeldorf, the swimming season runs from June to September, coinciding with the seasonal rise in air and water temperatures. The lake is only a few metres deep and therefore warms up quickly.

A grey sky or even light rain is certainly no reason for them to stop; they’re going to get wet anyway. I admire their attitude – I could imagine such an active and refreshing start to the day in this place for my retirement too!