Parties walking up from Kolochava to Mt Darvaika all seem to stop at the same tree. It is a heavy beech standing where the forest track has done most of its work and the open ground has not yet begun — the point on the climb where your legs suggest sitting down, and where there is something to sit under.
The wood around it is not ordinary wood. Kolochava lies inside Synevyr National Nature Park, and the Darvaika massif above the village carries the largest of the park's four primeval beech tracts: 1,588 hectares, added by UNESCO in July 2017 to the transnational beech-forest World Heritage site. You climb through old beech forest to reach this tree, which is why it reads as company rather than as a specimen.
The route leaves from near the village centre, by the post office, and follows green waymarks. Allow about 18 km there and back and a full day at an unhurried pace: pasture first, then the long haul through trees, then the Darvaika polonyna with its juniper and bilberry. The beech falls at the end of the forest section. Take the break here rather than pushing on — what comes next is open ground with no shade on it.
It photographs well, which is the honest reason most walkers stop: a grey trunk against the path, forest behind it, nothing built in the frame. The summit above is flat, grassy and 1,501 m, and it gives you the length of the Pishkonia ridge, the inner Gorgany, Mt Topas, the Vilshany reservoir and the best profile of Mt Strymba you will get from anywhere. Two practical notes. The waymark at the top has been reported broken, so carry a map you have downloaded rather than trusting the paint. And the forest track holds water — after a wet spell the descent takes longer than the climb did.
А ще легенда голосить
: «якщо в тебе опустились руки і немає більше сил і наснаги,обов’язково відвідай місце,стань під могутнім деревом,заплющ очі,зроби глибокий вдих…завмри на секунду і сила могутнього дерева наповнить тебе жагою до життя такою великою як була/є в цього Воїна»🧐
