Slovenia Mountain Trail – Day 4

7/11/2022

Daily Miles: 15

Total Miles: 60

Since we were the only ones at the Postarski Dom hut last night, the manager asked what time we wanted breakfast. We figured we would prefer breakfast a little earlier, so we requested 7:30am. Somehow we still left at the same time as previous mornings, but it was nice to have a relaxing meal. Breakfast today was coffee/tea, rolls with toppings and a bowl of blueberries. It is interesting to see the slight differences in meals between the huts. While breakfast is often very similar, dinners have been completely different at each hut.

It was blue skies and cool when we started out. We knew we had a big climb to start the day, so we were glad to be doing it when the air was cool. We had about 2,700 feet of climbing in less than four miles, so needless to say, it was a pretty steep climb. We managed to get to the top of Urslji Gora in just over two hours. We got our first stamp of the day in our trail passports there at a hut on the peak. It was a pretty nice spot and we sat at the picnic tables for a few minutes before heading on.

As soon as we left the peak, the trail headed down as steeply as we had ascended. As we hiked these really steep and challenging stretches of trail, we wonder how they can be categorized as “easy trail”. We wonder what has to happen for a trail to get a “difficult” rating. We figure that we are going to be really hurting when we get to the “difficult” or “very difficult” trail.

Once we finally made it down the descent, the trail was quite gradual for the most part. We stopped by another hut to get a stamp in our trail passports and got some ice cream for a snack.

The trail felt really quiet today as we really didn’t see other hikers after the peak in the morning. We are getting the feeling that things are busy in the mountains on the weekends, but during the week it is very quiet.

In our last hour of walking, we got a really nice view of Urslji Gora that we had climbed this morning. Looking at it from a distance, it looked like a very large, round knob. We got to our hut for the night, Smrekovcu Dom just after 4:30pm. We were really beat and happy to be able to take our shoes off for the rest of the day. There are several other hikers here for the night…one woman from New Zealand and a mother/daughter pair from Austria. We chatted for a bit with them, while drinking a cold Radler, which was nice.

We took showers and headed to the dining room for dinner, which was pasta with bolognese and mushroom soup with a buckwheat crumble to sprinkle on top. They were both good, but small, so we had dessert as well, which was something with blueberries.

After dinner we took a closer look at our schedule for the next week or so. We needed to adjust our schedule a bit, as we had planned for bigger days before totally understanding the daily logistics / trail difficulty and also a hut we had planned to stay at is closed after being burned down a few years ago. We decided to break up the big day we had scheduled for tomorrow into two shorter days. We figured our bodies will appreciate the break. We are still trying to work out how to deal with the burned down hut (the lack of the hut causes one to have a 10+ hour day of “very difficult” trail – no bueno!). We have a few feelers out for a backup option…hopefully it will come through, otherwise it will be a very painful day.

Since we have a shorter day tomorrow, we can sleep in until breakfast and not bother packing up until after we eat. It will be nice to have a more relaxed pace for the next few days.