Trip Report
The best photos are courtesy of Marius Schumi
My girlfriend at the time was working away in Romania and so I agreed to join her for a cheap holiday and some trekking. Romania was wonderful but bizarre for me; it was my first foray in eastern Europe and I was genuinely surprised by the rustic life styles many people still led. For example, once away from the main city areas, it was not unusual to see horse and carts travelling along cobbled roads. That said we found Romania easy to travel around, it was cheap and the people were very friendly.
Our main objective for the trip was a two or three day traverse along Fagaras ridge, home to the highest mountains in Romania. However for a couple of days we struggled to even access the ridge; terminating two attempts – one due to unstable terrain and another due to unreasonably steep terrain. On the night of the second failed attempt we made a surprise discovery whilst chatting to some locals in bar – a road had been built to the top of the ridge! Neither general Googling, nor our topo maps, had revealed this but lo and behold the locals were right and we made a very easy ascent up to the ridge the following day.
The two locals we’d met came with us for the first day and we walked in otherwise complete isolation with them. We learnt that very few locals ever come up to the ridge; this seemed surprising to me as the views were wonderful and the access was easy. Along our trek we encountered short sections of easy scrambling. However, some of these were slightly icy and so required care (we did not bring any technical climbing kit such as ropes, crampons or axes). We paused for lunch at a frozen lake nestled in a ring of mountains. It was a dramatic spot and encouraged me into a foolhardy decision to venture out onto the ice for a photo (I’ll put that moment down to my youth, I’m sure nothing similar would happen now…).
Shortly after lunch our local escorts left us and Lizzie and I carried on alone. We passed some startling terrain that evidenced just how much colder a north face really is. This was the most striking example of this that I’d seen and was definitely a good learning point for me as I was just in the process of spreading my wings as a fledgling mountaineer.
There were a few emergency shelters along our route but as the weather was good we decided to do a long day and carry on to a proper hut. The final kilometre or so of the route was on metal walkways bolted into sheer cliffs – a slightly intimidating prospect in the fading light. One of these walkways was also bent into a ‘v’ shape by a tree that had fallen on it, carefully climbing over this was probably the scariest part of the whole trip!
The hut was probably the creepiest place I’ve ever stayed at. It was honestly like something from a horror movie. It seem completely deserted and we entered into a long corridor with candles flickering on the walls. As we were walking around trying to find someone we saw a man walk past the window holding an axe – fortunately it emerged that he was just chopping wood for a fire and this wasn’t actually a horror movie! Despite being surprised to see us the hut warden was friendly enough, managing to fix us some dinner and showing us to our room. The room had a clever enclosed clay fire pit/chimney built into it – you lit the fire before you went to bed, causing the clay to heat up and then gradually release heat all night.
The following morning we woke to several inches of snow on the ground. This was unexpected as we’d been told there might be some light snowfall that afternoon – however it had definitely come in earlier and heavier. We set off early, conscious that the snow and poor visibility would slow our progress. I was also wary of some of the scrambling sections – they’d been precarious yesterday in good conditions and we weren’t really equipped to deal with them with snow underfoot.
Fortunately we ended up with an unlikely companion – the local hut dog! It followed us out of the hut and we were unable to turn it back despite our best efforts. We thought we’d lose it at the tree that had fallen on the walkway but a couple of acrobatic jumps later and it was still with us! Visibility was poor for the entire day and to begin with I was constantly trying to navigate off our map. However this was very difficult to do as the map was poor quality (I think 1:250,000) but was the best I could find when planning the trip. That said there are certainly better maps available now, and I may have just missed these previously. However it soon became apparent that map reading was unnecessary – we could follow the dog! It seemed to uncannily know where we wanted to go and would usually run off a few minutes ahead of us then lie down in the snow until we caught up. Once we switched to this tactic we moved much more quickly as we only needed to check the map periodically to work out if we were still on track.
We got back to our car just as darkness was falling. Actually to be honest we couldn’t find the car in the bad visibility until I slipped and slid down a slope about 10 metres, ending up directly in front of the car! Every cloud has a silver lining they say… There was a small café where we parked so we stopped for some hot food whilst Lizzie tried to talk me out of smuggling the dog home!
Neil Cox Misadventures 
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