Little Thuringian Forest

The Little Thuringian Forest (German: Kleiner Thüringer Wald) is the region of mountains and hills that lies southwest of Suhl and northwest of Schleusingen, and extends as far as a line from Schmeheim via Bischofrod and Gethles to Rappelsdorf.

From a geological viewpoint the Little Thuringian Forest is merely a strip of land in the bedrock of the Thuringian Forest that surfaces in the southwestern foothills of the mountains from the depositions of the Triassic period. In the northwest of the county of Hildburghausen this region extends northwest from Schleusingen, beginning near Rappelsdorf, via Gethles, Ahlstädt, Bischofrod, Keulrod, Eichenberg to north of the Sandberg near Grub. The Little Thuringian Forest is surrounded on all sides by forested mountains formed of bunter sandstone and muschelkalk, some of which rise over 200 metres above it. It is the farmed fields that characterises this hilly strip of land, not the forested heights above it.

According to the Thuringian State Administration in Weimar there is no legally recognized and protected landscape called the Little Thuringian Forest, even though several publications imply this. In the early 1990s, there was an application to do this, but it was never implemented. In any case these general publications are not referring to the little geological rock complex mentioned above, but the wooded ridges of bunter sandstone that rise to the north and northwest of it, including peaks such as the Donnersberg, Schleusinger Berg, Schneeberg, Kesselberg, Galgenberg, Eichenberg (the mountain), Ehrenberg etc.

In various hiking maps these ridges are also called the Little Thuringian Forest. If the hiker follows these maps and climbs, for example, the Schneeberg from Bischofrod or Eichenberg, then, according to the geological definition, he has left the Little Thuringian Forest well behind him.