Cheile Bicazului-Hășmaș
A limestone gorge with a road driven through its throat, and above it a lake made by a landslide in 1837 with the drowned spruces still standing.
The Bicaz has cut about six kilometres of gorge through Jurassic limestone on its way east off the Transylvanian side of the Carpathians, and the walls close hardest in the eight hundred metres between the Surduc rock and the Bardos wall — the stretch everyone calls Gâtul Iadului, Hell's Throat, where the Bicăjel comes in. Above and behind it the park takes in the Hășmaș massif proper, rising to 1,792 metres at Hășmașul Mare, with the free-standing tower of Piatra Singuratică at 1,587 and Piatra Altarului, 1,154 metres, guarding the gorge itself. The park was recognised by Legea 5/2000 at 6,575 hectares and delimited in 2003; summing the underlying forest and urban plans gives 7,072, and both figures appear in its own management documents. The limestone is richly fossiliferous, and it has been studied since Lill de Lillienbach in 1833 — Herbich's 1878 monograph on the geology of the Székely Land was built partly here.
Lacul Roșu sits at 983 metres just above the gorge and is the other reason people come. The park's own management plan dates it to July 1837, when storms and torrential rain brought a mass of rock off Muntele Ucigașul — the Killer Mountain, from which the Hungarian name Gyilkos-tó also derives — damming the Roșu, Licaș and Oii streams at once; an alternative account credits the earthquake of January 1838. Either way the water rose through a spruce forest and killed it standing, and the bleached trunks are still there, which is what makes the lake photograph the way it does. It is red from iron oxide washed in by the Pârâul Roșu, thirteen hectares in area and twelve and a half metres deep at most, and it is filling in: the plan records vegetation already established on silted parts of the bed.
The walls above the road carry the country's classic aid-climbing history. Piatra Altarului was first climbed in 1934 by Csallner Ervin and Goldschmidt Waldemar, two young men from Brașov, and the tower now has something like thirteen routes on it. The management plan — a legal instrument — takes the trouble to record the local dissent from its own account: the real hero, it notes, is Keresztes Zoltán of Joseni, who went up barefoot in Székely folk costume.
What's worth knowing before you go
Gheorgheni is the Transylvanian gateway, twenty-five kilometres from Lacul Roșu, and Bicaz the Moldavian one; both have railway stations, Gheorgheni on the Miercurea Ciuc–Deda main line and Bicaz at the end of the branch from Bacău through Piatra Neamț. The DN12C links them through the gorge. It is worth knowing that this road is old — the Gheorgheni approach was built in 1910 and the Bicaz section came into service in 1937 — and that it is a working transcarpathian route, open all year and busy.
Which sets the tone for a visit. The gorge floor is a drive-through with the traffic running directly beneath the walls and a strip of souvenir stalls at the narrows, so in July and August expect coaches and parked cars. Go early in the morning, or in the shoulder seasons. There are no cable cars anywhere in the park; Cabana Piatra Singuratică serves the Hășmaș ridge above, which sheds the crowds entirely, and the climbing season on the limestone runs roughly May to October — the walls hold water and ice late.
The large carnivores here are counted, unusually for Romania, and the numbers are small: the park estimates twelve or thirteen bears, two to six wolves and one or two lynx, while noting that the boundary covers only part of their ranges.