Monte Troodelöh

In November 1999 a group of employees of the Cologne city administration hiked up to what was then still recorded as the 116.7 m NHN and largely unknown highest elevation of Cologne, setting up a provisional summit cross there. After the municipal Office for Real Estate, Surveying and Cadastre re-surveyed the area in 2000, the height was corrected to the 118.04 m NHN that remains valid today.

In 2001, under the leadership of the Rhineland-Cologne section of the German Alpine Club, a new summit cross was installed with a bronze plaque recording the actual height. Shortly afterwards the forestry administration replaced the cross with a boulder, which now bears the plaque. That same year the spot received its name following a competition in the city staff newsletter – combining the surnames of its three „discoverers“ Troost, Dedden and Löhmer.

Today Monte Troodelöh features in numerous suggested routes in local hiking and Cologne guidebooks and is regarded as a sight worth seeing – even though it offers neither a view nor any catering. At the boulder there is an explanatory bronze plaque and a compartment for a summit book in which hikers who have reached the spot can sign in. The summit book has had to be replaced several times after acts of vandalism. Fourteen fully written volumes (as of April 2024) are kept in the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne.

The spot is mentioned in the song „Mer sin Eins“ by the Cologne band Kasalla – in the same line as the Pletschbach, a usually dry tributary of the Rhine in Worringen.