Wutach (river)

The Wutach is a river, 91 kilometres long, in the southeastern part of the Black Forest in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is a right-hand tributary of the Rhine. In its lower reaches it flows for about 6 kilometres along the border with the canton of Schaffhausen, Switzerland.

Name

The name Wutach means "furious water", referring to the whitewater rapids in the gorge. ''Wut'' is recognisably cognate to a modern German word for anger; ''ach'', which forms part of the names of many rivers in the region, comes from an old Celtic word for water, cognate with Latin ''aqua''.

Course

The river changes its name twice before it discharges into the High Rhine near Waldshut:

It rises in the Southern Black Forest as the Seebach in a highland hollow known as the ''Grüble'', only a few metres below the summit of the Seebuck, a subpeak of the Black Forest's highest mountain, the Feldberg. Shortly thereafter it drops in three cascades through a height of 62 metres down the Feldsee Waterfall into the rocky cirque lake of the Feldsee. Heading east-northeast, the stream then follows the glacially formed Bärental valley through the municipality of Feldberg to Lake Titisee. During this stretch it is joined by the Sägenbach, which rises on the Baldenweger Buck on the Feldberg. More than 70% of the average water volume of both streams is siphoned off before their confluence and diverted to the Schluchseewerk hydropower station. As a result, at the Bärental Gauge above the just under 5-metre-high Seebach Waterfall, the Seebach only has a volumetric flow of 0.3 m³/s instead of its natural 0.8 m³/s.Abfluss-BW - regionalisierte Abfluss-Kennwerte Baden-Württemberg
/ref> Below the little waterfall the Seebach enters a flat valley basin which has filled the silted-up, upper part of the Titisee since the last ice age. The stream now flows in wide meanders through the bogs of the nature reserve before reaching Lake Titisee.


From the Titisee the sluggishly flowing meadow river is called the Gutach ("good stream"). Before Neustadt it swings sharply through 90° to the right and heads southeast in the direction of the almost equally large Josbach/Langenordnach. Below the town, two large bridges cross the valley: the Gutach Viaduct carrying the B 31 and the ''Gutach Bridge'' with the Höllental Railway. From here on the river rushes through an ever deepening gorge.

From the confluence where the river acquires the name Wutach, it flows ESE through a series of three gorges with a total length of more than and a maximum depth of (see Wutach Gorge) which has long been a tourist attraction. Between the second and the last part of the gorge, near the village of Achdorf in the municipality of Blumberg, it takes a sharp turn (known as the ''Wutachknie'' or Knee of the Wutach), and subsequently flows SW to join the Rhine near Tiengen in the town of Waldshut-Tiengen.

At the ''Wutachknie'' the river is very close to the headwaters of the Danube, until the last glacial period the upper course of the Wutach was the headstream of the Danube catchment (called ''Feldbergdonau'').

The lower Wutach valley is straight, wide-bottomed and very densely populated. The river forms the border between Germany and Switzerland for two sections that total about 6 kilometres in length, after which it is canalised. The most important settlements in this part of the valley are the town of Stühlingen and the villages of Eggingen and Wutöschingen.

Before Lauchringen the Wutach turns again in the same direction as a tributary, this time the Klingengrabens/Kotbach which arrives in a broad valley from the Klettgau region. In Unterlauchringen the Wutach forms one of the largest waterfalls in Germany, the power of which is why the Lauffenmühle was built here, the largest industrial concern on the Wutach. The largest town in the Wutach valley is nearby Tiengen, where the Wutach is joined by the Kotbach from the Black Forest as well as its most important tributaries, the Steina and Schlücht. The Wutach finally empties into the High Rhine between Küssaberg-Kadelburg and Koblenz, a little below the rapids of the Kadelburger/Koblenzer Laufen.

The stretch of the Wutach is the site of two remarkable railways. The upper stretch of the first gorge is crossed and followed by the so-called '' Höllentalbahn''. The valley just below the third gorge is the site of the Wutach Valley Railway, officially known in German as the ''Wutachtalbahn'' but commonly known as the ''Sauschwänzlebahn'' (pigtail) because it proceeds in a series of tight turns, including crossing back over itself, in order to make a substantial increase in height without exceeding a 1:100 gradient.

Catchment

The Wutach drains almost the entire south-eastern slopes of the Black Forest. There, its waters first flow through glacially formed valley troughs, carved into the crystalline rocks of High Black Forest. Here are the lakes of the Feldsee and Titisee (Gutach), Windgfällweiher (Haslach), Schluchsee ( Schwarza) and Schlüchtsee ( Schlücht). After flowing through several very narrow ravines, the streams reach the edge of the Black Forest and the sandstone, limestone and mudstone series of the South German Scarplands. The lower course of the Wutach, which bends to head southwest, runs past the foot of the dominant White Jurassic step of the Swabian Jura and of Randen, at right angles to the dip slope and thus collects several Black forest rivers. The Kotbach, flowing from the other side to the east and parallel to the High Rhine, follows an ice age Rhine channel (the ''Klettgaurinne''). The Wutach only drains parts of the Black Forest and thus resembles the Enz in this respect.

The average annual discharge depths of the catchment area vary considerably; ranging from over 1,100 mm in the High Black Forest to less than 300 mm in the Klettgau.Walter Wundt: ''Die mittleren Abflusshöhen und Abflussspenden des Winters, des Sommers und des Jahres in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland'', Remagen, 1958, Kartenbeilage The visible depth of the Wutach in its river bed, is much lower than would be expected of a river than under natural circumstances drained a catchment of 1,140 km². This is due to the water siphoned off for the Schluchseewerk power station, which particularly affects its largest tributary, the Schlücht

Owing to its riverbed gradient of, on average, 13 ‰, critical high water often occurs on the Wutach. A well-known historical lithograph shows the valley floor at the Stühlinger Zwirnerei completely covered by water. Its lower reaches were therefore canalised and dyked in order to provide flood protection at the beginning of the 20th century. In the meantime, even former floodplains have been utilised for new construction and industrial areas.

River history

The lower Wutach flows along the line of the valley once occupied by the much more powerful upper Ancient Danube (''Urdonau''), but in the opposite direction. At the turn of the Miocene/Pliocene

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases