Piatra Craiului

Piatra Craiului is one object rather than a range. A wall of Jurassic limestone, laid down as reef and shoal, has been tilted up on its metamorphic basement into a crest twenty-five kilometres long and in places only a few metres wide at the top — the longest and narrowest limestone ridge in Romania, and the one that runs crosswise to everything around it. The Southern Carpathians trend east to west; Piatra Craiului cuts across that grain on a northeast–southwest line, which is why it reads on a map as a blade dropped onto the range rather than part of it. The high point, Vârful La Om — also called Piscul Baciului, the Shepherd's Peak — is 2,238 metres. The park covers 14,773 hectares split almost evenly between Argeș and Brașov, and its protection goes back to a Council of Ministers decision of 28 March 1938 that fenced off 440 hectares of the crest; national-park status followed in 1990 and the present boundaries in 2003.

The park's emblem is a carnation. Dianthus callizonus, the garofița Pietrei Craiului, was described in 1851 by the Austrian botanists Schott and Kotschy, working the Habsburg military frontier, and in the hundred and seventy-five years since, no second population has been found anywhere on earth. It grows on the limestone rocks and screes of this massif and nowhere else — not on the Bucegi across the valley, not in the rest of the Carpathians. Around fifty Carpathian endemics share the ridge with it, along with two spider species found only here and some two hundred and seventy butterflies. The chamois have done conspicuously well: roughly 250 animals now, close to triple the count when the park administration was set up in 1999.

Two things shape how the mountain is actually walked. The first is the western flank, which falls away in grohotișuri — vast fans of scree pouring off the crest, mobile, tiring, and impressive from below in a way no photograph manages. The second is that the ridge has no water on it at all. There are no springs on the crest; the limestone takes every drop of rain straight down into the karst, and it emerges far below in the gorges — Prăpăstiile Zărneștilor at the northern end, five kilometres of gravel track between walls up to two hundred metres high, and Cheile Dâmbovicioarei on the Argeș side. Everything a traverse needs must be carried up.

What's worth knowing before you go

Zărnești is the gateway, twenty-eight kilometres from Brașov by DN73A and the terminus of a branch railway, and the trailhead at Fântâna lui Botorog is a further five kilometres out — asphalt most of the way, gravel at the end, fine for any car. From there it is about two hours up to Cabana Curmătura at 1,470 metres, the only real cabana in the park at forty-four beds, which fills on summer weekends. The high refuges are unstaffed emergency shelters, some of them fibreglass igloos; Șaua Grindului at 2,026 metres is the highest. The full crest traverse is a committing exposed day with cable and chain sections, and in winter it is serious avalanche terrain — the Grind refuge was wrecked by an avalanche in the spring of 2005 and not repaired until 2017.

The detail worth the detour is at the edge of Zărnești and has nothing to do with the ridge. Libearty, opened in 2005, is sixty-nine hectares of oak forest holding around a hundred brown bears rescued from roadside cages and restaurant pits across Romania — the largest bear sanctuary in the world, run on donations with no public money. The animals are not released and not tame; you walk a boardwalk above forest and mostly see nothing, which is rather the point.