Munții Rodnei

Pietrosul Rodnei reaches 2,303 metres, which makes it the highest summit in the Eastern Carpathians and the only one in the range above 2,300. Ineu behind it is 2,279. The massif is a horst of crystalline schists worked over hard by Pleistocene ice, so the northern flank above Borșa is all cirques and troughs and moraine while the southern side towards Bistrița-Năsăud runs long and gentle. Lacul Iezer sits at over 1,800 metres in one of the three Zănoaga cirques ringing Pietrosul, on the standard route up; Lacul Lala Mare, at 1,815 metres below Ineu, is the largest glacial lake in the range, and Lala Mică just above it is barely half a metre deep.

Protection here is older than any other park in this atlas entry. In 1932 the Council of Ministers set aside 183 hectares of alpine grassland around Pietrosu Mare — the first scientific reserve of its kind in Romania — and it grew to 2,700 hectares in 1962 and 3,300 in 1977. UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere programme designated the core in 1979, and MAB still lists the reserve today at 47,202 hectares, essentially the whole park, though the intervening history is not clean: the 1995 Seville criteria require inhabited zones, Rodna's high-mountain core had none, and in 2017 the park's own director was quoted saying the designation had been lost. The park itself, 46,399 hectares under Legea 5/2000, is not in doubt.

Two things here are worth knowing that most accounts get wrong. The first is that a good deal of the wildlife was put back by hand. Marmots died out in the Romanian Carpathians in the nineteenth century, and in 1973 twelve animals were brought from the French Alps and released on Pietrosul Mare; they have spread on their own to Ineu, Corongiș and Gărgălău, and nobody has ever counted them. The chamois are equally reconstructed — forty-two kids netted in the Bucegi between 1964 and 1970, topped up later with adults from Piatra Craiului and Retezat. The second is botanical and genuinely remarkable: Saussurea porcii, a plant last collected in 1902 and presumed gone, was rediscovered in the park in 2014 after a hundred and twelve years. The valleys below carry a much older industry. Rodna Veche was mining lead in Roman times and is documented in 1235 with a mine, a metalworking shop and smelters whose jewellery was valued at Béla IV's court; the Mongol invasion of 1241 killed more than four thousand people there. The workings closed as unprofitable in 1932. Baia Borșa's tailings are more recent and worse: on 10 March 2000, five weeks after the Baia Mare cyanide spill, rain and snowmelt overtopped the Novăț pond and flushed some twenty thousand tonnes of mine waste into the Vișeu and on into the Tisza.

What's worth knowing before you go

Borșa in Maramureș is the main arrival town, with the tourist complex twelve kilometres out; Rodna, Șanț and Sângeorz-Băi give access from the south. Borșa is not itself on the railway — Vișeu de Jos, on the Salva–Vișeu line, is the practical railhead, and then it is east on the DN18. That road climbs to Pasul Prislop at 1,416 metres, the highest road pass in the Eastern Carpathians, where the Hora de la Prislop folklore festival fills the saddle on the first Sunday after the Assumption each August.

The Borșa chairlift, inaugurated in 1982, runs all year and is the quickest way to Cascada Cailor — which is often called Romania's tallest waterfall and is not; it drops something like ninety to a hundred metres in successive steps. The gondola serves the Olympic piste at weekends only. For Pietrosul, take the blue markings from Borșa past the meteorological station and Lacul Iezer, and reckon on full winter conditions above 2,000 metres well into May in the north-facing cirques.

One thing to keep straight: the steam forest railway up the Vaser valley, the Mocănița, is at Vișeu de Sus in the neighbouring Maramureș Mountains nature park, not in this one. It is worth the day; it is just not here.