Krkonoše

Krkonoše — the Giant Mountains, Riesengebirge — was declared a national park by government decree on 17 May 1963, the first in Czechoslovakia and still the oldest in Czechia. Poland had got there four years earlier: Karkonoski Park Narodowy dates from January 1959, the frontier runs along the summit ridge, and the two halves were made a joint UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1992. The Czech park is 363 square kilometres, with a further 184 of ochranné pásmo — buffer zone, added separately in 1986 — wrapped around its southern foot, which is where Janské Lázně, Svoboda nad Úpou and Rokytnice nad Jizerou sit: in the buffer, not in the park. Sněžka, 1,603 metres, is the high point of the park and of the country, and the border crosses its summit.

What makes the range worth a park is not its height but what survives on top of it. Above roughly 1,450 metres the spruce gives out, and what replaces it is not alpine meadow but tundra — an outlier of the arctic left stranded when the ice sheets withdrew north, holding on through eight thousand years of warmer weather because the plateau is flat, wind-scoured and cold enough. Peat bogs lie across it, Úpské rašeliniště and Pančavská louka among them, listed under the Ramsar convention. Glacial cirques are bitten into the flanks — Labský důl, Obří důl, the Kotelní jámy, all reserves since 1952 — and out of the lip of one of them the Pančava falls 148 metres, the tallest waterfall in the country. A few hundred metres away, at just under 1,400, is pramen Labe, the source of the Elbe. The isolation has bred its own species: the rowan Sorbus sudetica and the bellflower Campanula bohemica grow here and nowhere else on earth.

People have been working these mountains since the Middle Ages, first for ore and then for glass — the Harrachov glassworks has been going since 1712 — and the woods were cut to fire both. Landlords brought in woodcutters from Styria and Tyrol in the sixteenth century, and their descendants turned to cattle and hay on the cleared slopes; the boudy, the scattered timber chalets of that mountain economy, are still the plateau's architecture, Luční bouda the largest of them. Krakonoš, the weather-making mountain spirit the Germans called Rübezahl, belongs to the same centuries. The damage came later. Nineteenth-century forestry replaced mixed woodland with spruce monoculture, and in the 1970s and 1980s sulphur blowing off the lignite basins of the Black Triangle killed it outright: whole ridges of grey standing dead, one of the worst forest diebacks in Europe. Replanting since has used a broader mix, the ridges are green again, and the soils are still catching up.

The park's permanent argument is that two ski resorts, Špindlerův Mlýn and Pec pod Sněžkou, lie inside its boundary, and that Krkonoše is the most visited protected area in the country. Tundra and lift queues share a mountain here, which is why the zoning is strict.

What's worth knowing before you go

Vrchlabí is the administrative seat, with the park museum in the old Augustinian monastery, and trains reach it as well as Harrachov and Svoboda nad Úpou; from Pec pod Sněžkou a cable car climbs Sněžka in two stages. The Krkonošská magistrála runs the length of the ridge and is the classic multi-day walk. Late June and early July give the ridge flora, September and October the clearest air and the best colour on the lower slopes. In winter the plateau is serious avalanche country — some twenty slides a season on the Czech side, in a fifteen-kilometre strip between Sněžka and Kotel — but contrary to what the tourism sites still print, nothing shuts by the calendar: the marked routes through Obří důl and over Sněžka stay open all winter, and the mountain service closes avalanche ground only when the danger rating actually reaches four or five. What does bind you is the quiet zones — eight of them, about a fifth of the park and most of the ridge — where you must keep to the designated routes. The penalty is not nominal: a ski tourer dug out of an avalanche in Obří důl in 2021 was fined eighty thousand crowns afterwards for having been off-route when it caught him.

The detail worth carrying up: in 1961 the botanist Jan Jeník worked out why the richest tundra vegetation clusters on the leeward lips of the cirques rather than spreading evenly. West-east valleys funnel wind up and over the ridge, and it dumps its snow and its seed on the far side — anemo-orographic systems, he called them — and the same analysis, in the same year, was used to map where the ridge's avalanches run. The snow that grows the flora is the snow that slides; once you know, you can read the whole plateau from where it lies.