Lake Vorozheska

Everything in Vorozheska arrives from one patch of snow. The stream that feeds the lake begins in a drift packed down into firn — the granular half-ice that forms when snow survives a summer — lying in permanent shade under the ridge above. Most years the patch holds. In the hottest ones it melts out completely, the inflow stops, and a lake with no other supply, 1,460 m up on the northern flank of Svydovets, starts to go down. Guidebooks have begun billing a visit as a last chance, which is usually a sales line; here the mechanism is plain enough to check with your own eyes.

There are two lakes, not one, which is the first thing that surprises people on arrival. The upper basin is almost a circle, 95 m across, 0.7 ha, and reaches 4.5 m — deep, by the standards of this ridge. Fifteen metres below it sits a second pool, 76 m by 28, about 0.2 ha, nowhere more than 1.9 m. Both are clear enough to read the silt bed through, and both sit around +12 °C at the height of August.

Cut by ice, kept going by snow

The hollow is glacial, a cirque bitten into the north side of the massif at the end of the last glaciation, and in that it is family to the basins holding Dohiaska, Apshynets and Ivor a few kilometres along the crest. The difference is what happened afterwards. Those lakes draw on groundwater or a permanent inflowing stream. Vorozheska was left dependent on a single north-facing snowfield that the sun mostly misses — a good arrangement for ten thousand years, and a precarious one now.

The setting is open polonyna: no trees, grass cropped short, Velykyi Kotel closing the skyline to the south-east at 1,771 m. From the rim above the upper basin you can see both pools at once, one stacked behind the other, which is the photograph people come up for and the reason a lot of walkers never bother going down to the water at all.

Where the name comes from

Vorozheska shares a root with vorozhyi, hostile, and the local stories lean on it. In one, two herdsmen were caught by a storm on the high pasture and died there, and the lakes formed where they fell. In the other, two brothers raced each other across the water for a girl named Mariika and both drowned when the weather turned; the mother of one is said to have stood on the bank afterwards and asked the lake why it was so hostile to her. The same root gives vorozhka, a woman who tells fortunes, and you will hear that version too, usually from whoever is selling the walk.

Walking in

The short approach is from Chorna Tysa: around 5 km on foot, though the village lies more than 600 m below the lake, so this is a climb rather than a stroll and it will take most of a morning. The alternative is the ridge from Drahobrat, which is how Vorozheska usually gets combined with Dohiaska and the Blyznytsia peaks into one long day. Reaching Drahobrat itself needs four-wheel drive from Yasinia — ordinary cars stop in the village and local drivers run the last section up.

From Yasinia there are yellow and green waymarked lines that climb to Drahobrat first; from Kvasy, a longer red route crosses the Blyznytsia peaks before dropping onto the Svydovets crest. Whichever you take, the last descent from the ridge to the water is steep and loose underfoot, and the ground between the lakes is unmarked once you leave the crest line. Weather here changes inside the hour, there is no shelter, and phone signal between Drahobrat and the lakes is unreliable at best.

It is a reserve, and it shows when it is not treated like one

Vorozheska is a hydrological monument of local significance and lies inside the Carpathian Biosphere Reserve. The damage that actually happens comes from two directions: off-road vehicles driven onto the polonyna, and swimming in a pool a few metres deep that holds a small, cold, easily wrecked ecosystem. The volunteers of Karpatski Stezhky have put an information post at the lake making the point. Pitch a tent well back from the bank, carry out everything you carry in, and skip the swim — at +12 °C you were not going to enjoy it.

Go in July or August if you want the pasture at its best and the water at its warmest; go in June if you want to see the snowfield still doing its job. Either way, take a windproof layer and more water than the distance suggests. There is nowhere to refill that you should be drinking from.