We went on a hike to Bobotuv Kuk today, the highest peak in Montenegro.
It started off as a gentle and easy trail, albeit a little scary as we traversed a narrow ledge towards a small pass that led to a beautiful valley behind where snow fields are still melting even though it’s July. The trail gently winds through wildflower meadows and stops at a clear blue glacial lake before banking vertically up a vertigo-inducing couloir where we had to scramble up loose boulders towards the ridge that houses the summit. There was a viewpoint right before the lake where we got a good view of the peak, though we had to strain our eyes to figure out where the trails would take us. It’s so steep over such a short distance that it seemed so impossible.
We soon found out that even after we got up to the ridge, there were even more scrambling traversing the face of the ridge to the back of the peak. For the last part of the hike we had to clamber up the sides of the steep peak with the aid of a rope bolted to the side of the mountain. I tried to always keep my weight towards the mountain so I wouldn’t fall off the other side.
The views throughout the hike was spectacular – a geologist’s wet dream I’d say. Rock formations of the mountain ranges all around us are visible at such a scale that you could sort of make out how these layers are formed and deformed many times over by the Earth. Evidence of glacier melt in full view as tonnes of ice moving through the landscape scarred it permanently. Basalt rocks that used to be the top layer now lie at the bottom of the valley in a giant boulder field. Majestic when you think how these things are formed over millions of years – which is the natural scale of time. In comparison, homo sapiens’ history, our life, our time scale is but a blink of an eye. How could we ever think that we’re grander than all these forces that have shaped the world we live in in such an unfathomable scale?
