Synohora

Synohora — "blue mountain" — covers 10,866 hectares of the Gorgany at the head of the Bystrytsia Solotvynska, around the villages of Huta and Stara Huta; the first of them, as the name says, grew up around a glassworks. The Gorgany are the harshest walking country in the Ukrainian Carpathians, named for their gorgany — vast frost-shattered stone runs that armour the ridgelines and slow a fit hiker to a scramble — and this park holds a full share of them: its western rim rises to the massifs of Syvulia, at 1,836 metres the highest summit of the whole Gorgany group, and Ihrovets at 1,804, mountains already marked on Friedrich von Mieg's Austrian survey sheets of 1779–83.

The park's origin is the strangest in Ukraine. In the early 2000s the state property office built a presidential residence above Huta — a great timber complex in Hutsul style, a hunting-lodge Camp David for the Kuchma era — and in December 2009 a national park was decreed around it, administered not by the environment ministry but by the same office that kept the residence. The arrangement outlived its logic: the complex functioned as a residence only until the end of 2021, and today the wooden palace takes tour groups, an artefact of post-Soviet statecraft parked incongruously among the spruce. However backwards the sequence, the effect was real — ten thousand hectares of the upper Bystrytsia forest closed to logging.

The mountains carry an older state's leavings too. The Austro-Russian front of the First World War crossed the Gorgany crests in 1916–17, and the approaches to Syvulia still show stone breastworks and rusted wire from positions held at eighteen hundred metres through two winters — the highest battlefield archaeology in Ukraine, slowly disappearing into the stone runs it was built from. Below the crests the park is deep spruce forest with mountain pine above, bear and lynx present, and the young Bystrytsia Solotvynska running clear through the middle of it.

What's worth knowing before you go

The approach is from Ivano-Frankivsk through Bohorodchany and Solotvyn to Huta — about two hours, with buses to the village and the last stretch on your own arrangements. The residence is visitable on excursions booked ahead through the park; the villages have guesthouses, and Stara Huta is the practical trailhead for the high ridges. The Syvulia round from there is a long, genuinely hard day: the final kilometres are on the stone runs, where a mapped hour is an honest two, and an ankle roll is the local injury. Register with the mountain rescue service before going high.

July to September is the season — the gorgany fields hold snow in their cavities into early summer and turn lethal under ice. The connoisseur's detour, near the top of Syvulia, is to leave the cairned line and look for the war: a collapsed breastwork, a strand of wire in the lichen — then put nothing in your pocket and walk on.