Lake Ivor

The last stretch of road to Drahobrat is done in the back of a Soviet army truck. Ordinary cars stop in Yasinia, crossovers get shaken apart, and what goes up is a UAZ or a GAZ-66 with benches bolted in: forty minutes of ruts, boulders and stream crossings, at a price the local drivers agree among themselves. From the top, Lake Ivor is a three-kilometre walk. That makes it the easiest high lake in Svydovets to reach on foot and one of the hardest to reach at all.

Don't let the effort inflate your expectations of the lake. Ivor runs about 50 m long by 21 m wide, a tenth of a hectare of water, nowhere deeper than 1.5 m. It is a pond by any honest measure, lying at 1,600 m in a hollow between the Zhandarmy crags and Blyznytsia. Locals mostly call it Drahobratske, after the resort below.

Meltwater in a hollow of moraine

Ivor is glacial. Ice retreated from the northern slopes of Blyznytsia around ten thousand years ago and meltwater gathered in the long trough it left. Nothing feeds the lake now but rain, snowmelt and groundwater; no stream runs in carrying silt, and that single fact is the whole explanation for its clarity. The banks are moraine rubble, sedge creeps in along the edges, the bed is grey mud.

Almost nothing lives in it: microscopic crustaceans, and that is the list — no fish, and no prospect of any. Boil the water before you drink it. People swim here, and the lake is clear enough to make that tempting and cold enough to keep it brief.

The view is the reason to climb

Ivor's own dimensions are not why anyone walks up here. Stand at the water and the Gorgany ridge fills the northern horizon; turn round and Chornohora comes up with Petros at the end of it. Below, the valley villages lie scattered like spilled matches, and the white specks drifting over the green polonyny resolve into flocks of sheep. Come in summer, and check the sky before you set off: in low cloud, which this ridge produces at short notice, the whole point of the walk disappears.

Two brothers, one girl and the stone Gendarmes

The legend attached to Ivor names three features at once. Two brothers loved the same Hutsul girl and neither would stand aside, so she set them a task — bring an edelweiss from the cliffs of Blyznytsia, and the first one back would marry her. The younger took the steeper line, slipped and was left hanging over the drop; the elder went for him, and the rock gave way under the weight of two. The girl climbed to the spot, wept until her tears filled the hollow, and died of grief.

Drahobrat — ‘dear brother’ — and Ivor both come from that night, and the gendarmes sent to investigate turned to stone where they stood, which is why the Zhandarmy crags guard the way to Blyznytsia. Synevyr tells a near-identical tears-into-a-lake story, as do several lakes in the range; this one at least earns its keep by explaining the map.

Three ways to arrive

The short version is a there-and-back walk from Drahobrat: roughly 3 km of dirt track that thins to a path over the final rises, crossing blueberry ground and open pasture. The climb is not hard and it slots into an ordinary stay at the resort with no tent and no planning. Wear proper boots anyway; the ground is loose.

Longer routes treat Ivor as a waypoint. The Svydovets massif traverse starts in Yasinia and runs over Velyka Blyznytsia, Blyznytsia and the Zhandarmy to Ivor, then on to Lake Vorozheska and past a Second World War bunker — about 33 km across two days. A larger loop from Kvasy runs 48 km over three days to Chorna Tysa, or 56 km and four days on to Bystrytsia. Trains reach Rakhiv from Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Kyiv, buses reach Yasinia from most Transcarpathian towns, and Kvasy has its own station on the Rakhiv line. Then comes the truck.

Sleeping in a wind tunnel

The ground rises sharply behind the water, and in wind the hollow funnels it. A tent on the shore looks idyllic on a still evening and is miserable by two in the morning. Sleep at Drahobrat instead, or find something more sheltered along the ridge.

There is no firewood up here, only zherep, the dwarf pine matting these slopes, and cutting it is banned. Bring a gas stove with spare fuel, a warm layer and a rain shell whatever the forecast said in the valley, and enough water. Watch for loose scree coming off the tops, and carry your rubbish out: Ivor's reputation rests on being clean, and it stays that way only because most people bother.