Nízke Tatry

The Low Tatras are low only by comparison with their neighbour across the Váh. The range is a single ridge running east–west for some eighty kilometres between the valleys of the Váh and the Hron, longer than the High Tatras and broader, topping out on Ďumbier at 2,046 metres; the national park, declared in 1978 and re-drawn in 1997 at 72,842 hectares, is one of the two largest in Slovakia and covers essentially the whole crest. The Čertovica pass carries the one road over the middle of it and literally splits the park's boundary in two — the western, granite half around Ďumbier and Chopok, and the eastern half running out to Kráľova hoľa, the bald 1,946-metre dome that anchors half the folk songs in the country and sheds four rivers — the Čierny Váh, the Hron, the Hnilec and the Hornád all rise under it.

What the granite core carries on its back, the limestone flanks carry underneath. The Demänovská valley on the northern side is hollow: the Demänovský cave system is Slovakia's longest at well over forty kilometres, of which the public sees the Cave of Liberty — discovered in 1921 and still the country's most visited — and the older Ice Cave. On the same flank the karst of Jánska dolina hides shafts that reach the deepest points in Slovakia. This is also the country's most serious bear ground; the park's forests, from the beech of the lower Hron side up through spruce to dwarf pine, hold the densest brown-bear population in the Western Carpathians, with wolves and lynx behind them.

The park's permanent argument stands on Chopok. Jasná, on the Demänovská side, is the biggest ski resort in Slovakia, and its cable cars ride to the 2,024-metre summit from both north and south — the resort is inside the national park, which is precisely why every proposed expansion becomes a national controversy. The 1997 re-declaration that trimmed the park's area was in part an accounting of that reality; what the boundary keeps is still the best ridge walking in the country, a crest that stays above the trees for days at a time.

What's worth knowing before you go

Liptovský Mikuláš serves the northern valleys and Brezno the southern ones; Jasná and the Demänovská caves have year-round bus links and year-round openings. The classic undertaking is the ridge traverse from Donovaly over Chopok and Ďumbier to Čertovica and on to Kráľova hoľa — three to four days hut-to-hut, with Štefánikova chata under Ďumbier the historic anchor. Water is the traverse's real constraint: the crest is porous and springs sit well below it. Winter turns the same crest into avalanche terrain with the highest incident count in Slovakia, and the exposed sections between Chopok and Ďumbier are genuinely committing in wind. The connoisseur's detail is at the eastern end: time the Kráľova hoľa summit for early morning and you look down the whole eighty kilometres of ridge you have walked or mean to, with the High Tatras stacked behind it — and the spring under the summit is the infant Hron, which you can step across here and cross on bridges at Banská Bystrica.