Few weeks ago, I and my brother decided to spend one night on the mountain ridge for the first time in our lives. My brother chose the destination West Tatras, because the West Tatras are great for ridge trail hikes. The problem is, that at the beginning you have to gain the height really quickly but afterwards hiking is very pleasant as you are walking on the ridge, 2 000 meters high above sea level with an amazing panoramic view to the all directions.
And believe me that the initial phase of the hike was really difficult. Difficult, because of the hot weather and the heavy backpack I was carrying. I´m not used to carry 15 kg heavy backpack, packed with liters of water. But the water was the heaviest part of the burden as you can´t count with mountain streams or springs at the ridge. The best moment of the day was when I took off the backpack and sat on the ground while the sun was already setting down. There´s no need to tell you, how good I felt when I heard the fizz of beer.
As we were sitting on the grass and watching the sunset, we suddenly heard some strange noises. When we stood up, we saw the chamoix grazing only a couple of meters away from us. They weren´t feared. They were even grazing next to us during the whole night. I have to admit that I was scared, because there are a lot of bears living in the West Tatra, but as long as the chamoix were close to us, I felt safe. It all changed at around 11 pm. I still didn´t sleep. I heard chamoix close to us. Suddenly one of them warned the whole flock with whistling sound and then all ran away. I was really scared and the first thought that came to my mind was – a bear, but fortunately no bear showed up. I couldn’t fall asleep for the next couple of hours, till the chamoix didn´t come back.
That night I slept for about 3 hours. When I woke up in the morning we were surrounded by the chamoix again. We quickly packed our stuff and ascent to Hrubý vrch peak to see the sunrise. After eating breakfast we continued on the ridge, passing the chamoix again and again and we went back through Gáborova dolina valley to the place where we started.
See more pics of chamoix in the previous blog post.
It was an amazing experience and I´m glad we made it. We already think about other overnight stay in other Slovak mountain range. I´d prefer the one without bears. But that´s impossible, as there is no range like this. 🙂
You can find the route of our hike at the end of this post.
And now look at the gallery below to see, how beautiful the West Tatras are!
Here is the route of our hike:
