Krkonoše, Riesengebirge - the Giant Mountains. My childhood winter wonderland on the northern edge of Bohemia.
Remote, wild, uninhabited, passable only through secluded, distant passes of the Bohemian - Silesian frontier... but that's long time ago. During the last two centuries the Giant Mountains were subjected to a rapid growth of tourism. This peripheral romantic wilderness, once admired by the likes of Mácha and Friedrich, was among the first places interwoven with marked hiking trails and dotted by pastoral shelters tranformed into chalets.
A local landlord, count Harrach, introduced skiing there in 1890s, after visiting Norway. A decade later, Bohemian and German ski clubs formed, several local skiers belonged among the prominent early Olympic athletes of the late Austrian Empire and the whole Europe.
Nowadays the Krkonoše are flooded by tourism, with chalets on the highest ridges reachable by car through paved roads during summer months, wooded slopes giving way to ski lifts.
But although thus wounded, the tame Giant Mountains can still become a fierce, cold and inhospitable place during winter, even dangerous, as evidenced by a number of monuments to their victims - seasoned landowners and leading athletes among them - erected on their ridges.
Swept by wet winds from the northern seas, for which these slopes and ridges form a barrier at the fringe of the vast open North European Plain, an unique Arctic-alpine tundra formed on local high plateaux during the last ice age. Fueled by wind, snow, frost and rain it survived to our day.
But the Krkonoše are hurt by the effects of the Anthropocene. The winds from the North Sea and the Baltic, which brought the ever abundant snow, changed, winters drying. The tundra recedes and forests on the slopes bellow are drying out, long suffering from industrial emissions.
Perhaps the Krkonoše may soon lack the amount of snow necessary for the traditional backcountry skiing. The distinctive local skiing culture will wither with the tundra and the atmosphere of the winter - so cruel, grueling, unyielding and yet so brilliant - may disappear.
The Krkonoše National park is one of the most visited but also one of the most endangered national parks in the world. We must try to learn to live in accordance with the mountains, cohabiting with them instead of exploiting them. Here's hoping this remarkable creation of nature will avoid more devastation.
(Photographed in February, 2020.)
