Krkonoše

I came to Krkonoše from Prague by train to Špindlerův Mlýn, changing at Trutnov, and the journey felt like a slow calibration from city to mountain. The train window showed the landscape thickening from fields to mixed forest to the darker spruce of upper elevations, and the final section through the valley of the Elbe — which begins here, of all places, as a small cold stream — had a quality of arrival that I wasn’t expecting. The valley is deep and narrow and the road and river share it with an audible urgency. By the time I reached Špindlerův Mlýn, the resort village at the valley head, the temperature had dropped four degrees from Trutnov below.

Krkonoše — the Giant Mountains — form the highest range in the Bohemian Massif, with Sněžka, the highest summit of the entire Czech Republic, reaching 1,603 metres on the Polish border. The mountains are not dramatic in the alpine sense — no exposed rock towers, no glaciers, no technical challenges — but they have a different and particular grandeur that comes from their rounded, above-treeline ridgelines running for kilometres through subalpine grassland. These are old mountains, worn smooth over vast time, and the landscape above the treeline has the ancient, slightly eerie quality that long-stable ecosystems accumulate. The krkonošská tundra — the alpine meadows of Krkonoše — is one of the rarest habitats in the Czech Republic, and in July it is covered in a wildflower display that makes the effort of getting up there feel immediately justified.

The trail up to Sněžka from Pec pod Sněžkou is the main event for most visitors, and I did it on a Wednesday when the conditions were clear and the summit was, consequently, shared with a large number of Czech families who had come prepared with packed lunches, waterproofs, and the purposeful equipment selection that suggests these mountains are a habit rather than a novelty. There is a meteorological observatory on the summit, a circular Polish post office, and a café that serves hot drinks to hikers at an altitude where hot drinks are always the right answer. I drank black coffee and looked north into Poland, which from up there looks indistinguishable from the Czech side because it is: the same rounded hills, the same spruce, the same cloud formation moving in from the west.

The waterfalls are a separate reason to come. Pančavský vodopád — at 148 metres the tallest waterfall in the Czech Republic — drops off the plateau edge above Špindlerův Mlýn in a section where the streams that drain the subalpine meadows suddenly run out of gradient. In spring and after rain, the sound of it reaches the viewpoint below as a continuous low roar. I walked there from the valley in about two hours, arriving in a fine mist from the waterfall spray that made the air around the falls smell of cold stone and mountain water, which is a smell I will remember specifically.

The mountain huts — horské chaty — scattered across the ridgeline are a crucial part of the Krkonoše experience. The Luční bouda, Vosecká bouda, and Labská bouda are operational in summer and winter, serving hot food and, crucially, Czech beer at altitude, which feels like an eccentric cultural decision until you’ve been hiking for five hours and it becomes the only decision that makes any sense. I spent a night at Luční bouda in a dormitory bed, ate goulash in a dining room full of Czechs in various states of wet-weather gear, and fell asleep to the sound of wind on the roof and woke up to cloud that had sat on the ridge overnight and was only beginning to clear when I left at seven-thirty.

When to go: July and August for the subalpine wildflowers and the best summit conditions; September and October for the autumn colours in the valley forests and fewer hikers on the ridge. December through March is serious cross-country ski territory — Krkonoše has the most extensive Nordic ski trail network in the Czech Republic. Avoid the Easter week rush: it’s crowded and the snow conditions are often poor.