Drahobrat Falls

Seven metres. That is the entire Drahobrat waterfall, and the price of admission is a four-wheel-drive up a wrecked mountain road plus two to three hours on foot each way. Nobody should make that trip for the waterfall alone, and the guides who send you up there know it.

Make it for the ridge. The fall sits at about 1,470m on the Svydovets massif, strung on the same web of paths as four glacial lakes, and it works as a stop on a long day up high rather than a destination. Time it for late spring, when the massif's snowpack is going, or a couple of days after heavy rain. Arrive in a dry August and you get seven metres of damp rock with a stream on it.

Three names, one waterfall

You will meet this place as the Drahobrat falls, after the resort below it; as the Svydovets falls, after the massif, which is how the protected-site register files it; and as the Hereshka falls, after Mt Dohiaska and Lake Herashaska upstream. Same water, three sets of directions, a good deal of confusion in trip reports. The stream is the upper Kisva, a Tysa headwater.

What the water actually does

It is a cascade, not a drop. The stream works down a jumble of ledges and boulders for about 7m in total, and the noise comes off the rock rather than out of the air. In full spate it is loud in a way the height does not predict; in low water it is a mountain stream doing stairs. The altitude is what you are really buying: at 1,470m you are among open polonyna rather than forest, and what you look at over lunch is the Svydovets crest — where the water at your feet fell as snow a few weeks earlier.

A protected 0.37 hectares

The falls are a hydrological monument of local significance, designated by oblast decision in November 1969 and confirmed in October 1984 — considerably earlier than the 1997 date that circulates on travel sites. The protected plot covers 0.37ha and was formally handed to the Carpathian Biosphere Reserve on 27 December 2006. Carry your rubbish out and camp at the resort, not on the site.

The walk from the resort

The path starts at Drahobrat and runs past Mt Stih towards Apshynets, along the ridge used by everyone heading for Lake Herashaska; the marker is the rectangular blaze, two white bars with yellow between. At a point on the crest you turn left and drop off it to the water, and that descent is the awkward part — steep, loose in places, worse coming up than going down. Two to three hours one way.

Weather on the Svydovets ridge changes without warning and there is no shelter between the resort and the water; a rain shell and a warm layer in July are not overcautious. If the walk is more than you want, drivers at the resort will run a 4x4 towards this side of the massif and cut out much of it.

The lakes, which are the real reason to be up here

Just upstream, at 1,577m in a glacial cirque under Mt Dohiaska (1,761m), lies Lake Herashaska — also written Dohiaska. It is about 125m by 110m, covers 1.2ha and is nowhere much more than 1.2m deep. The water rarely climbs past 10 degrees, so standing in it is a short experience.

Three more sit within a day of it. Ivor, at roughly 1,600m, is small, clear and close enough to the resort for an evening stroll; Apshynets is at 1,487m, Vorozheska at 1,460m, fed by a snowfield that shrinks a little every year. One committed day covers all four, with the caveat that every descent from the crest to a shoreline is steep and every re-ascent steeper. Plenty of walkers stay on the ridge and photograph them from above. The Zhandarmy, a row of rock teeth on the crest, are on the way.

Getting to Drahobrat at all

Yasinia is the staging post: trains reach it and Rakhiv from Lviv and Kyiv, buses run from Ivano-Frankivsk, Yaremche and Uzhhorod, and drivers come via Nadvirna.

The last leg is the problem. The 10—13km from Yasinia up to Drahobrat is a broken mountain road that eats crossovers; local operators run the transfer in UAZs and GAZ-66 trucks, in summer as well as winter. Drahobrat is the highest ski resort in Ukraine, between about 1,400 and 1,700m, and its snow routinely lasts into April — worth knowing before booking a walk to the waterfall in May.