Tatry

The Tatras are the one place where the Carpathians stop being a forested arc and become genuine alpine mountains — a granite crest barely twenty-six kilometres end to end that still finds room for Gerlachovský štít, at 2,655 metres the highest point of the entire fifteen-hundred-kilometre Carpathian system. The Slovak National Council declared Tatranský národný park on the first day of 1949, which makes TANAP the oldest national park in this atlas east of the Alps, and the 2003 re-declaration settled it at 73,800 hectares: the High Tatras' granite core, the quieter Western Tatras, and the limestone Belianske Tatras hung on the eastern end. Poland's Tatrzański Park Narodowy took the far side of the ridge in 1954, and since 1993 the two halves have formed a single UNESCO biosphere reserve.

The ice did the architecture. Pleistocene glaciers cut the valleys into troughs and left about a hundred plesá — tarns — in their beds, from Veľké Hincovo, the largest and deepest at twenty hectares and fifty-three metres, down to nameless pools in the boulder fields. Rysy, 2,499 metres on the border, carries Poland's highest ground on its northwest summit; Kriváň's bent horn, the mountain every Slovak national movement since the 1840s has climbed on principle, is on the euro coins; and Lomnický štít, 2,634 metres, has carried a cable car and a meteorological observatory since 1940 — still one of the highest year-round workplaces in central Europe. The Belianske Tatry are the range's closed wing: their ridges have been off-limits since 1978 to protect chamois range and limestone flora, and only the Monkova dolina route samples them.

The park's emblematic animal is the Tatra chamois, an endemic subspecies stranded here since the ice retreated, sharing the heights with marmots, golden eagles and a solid bear population. Its emblematic catastrophe is more recent: on 19 November 2004 a downslope windstorm flattened some twelve thousand hectares of spruce along the southern foot in a few hours, a swathe from Podbanské to Tatranská Kotlina that took resort villages' shelter belts with it. The bark-beetle years that followed turned forest policy into the park's loudest argument, but two decades on the regrowth is coming back deliberately mixed — larch, rowan and fir among the spruce — and the storm corridor reads as a lesson in what a monoculture costs.

What's worth knowing before you go

Poprad is the rail gateway, and from it the Tatranská elektrická železnica — the red electric trams — threads the resort towns of Štrbské Pleso, Starý Smokovec and Tatranská Lomnica; you can treat the whole south face as one linear trailhead. The high routes are seasonal by law: everything above the highest huts closes from 1 November to 15 June, and off-trail terrain is guides-only unless you hold an alpine club card. The hut network is the range's real culture — Téryho, Zbojnícka, and Chata pod Rysmi at 2,250 metres, the country's highest — and supplies still go up on the backs of nosiči, the Tatra porters, on wooden frames loaded to eighty kilos and more. Meet one on the Rysy trail and you understand the local scale of things. September gives the clearest rock and the smallest crowds; the Kriváň ascent is at its best then, and at its busiest around the národný výstup, the traditional mass climb, in August.