Slovenia Mountain Trail – Day 9

7/16/2022

Daily Miles: 6

Total Miles: 102

When we went to sleep last night, it was raining with lightning and thunder. When we woke up this morning, the rain had stopped, but we were totally fogged in. Luckily by the time we were done with breakfast, the fog was starting to lift.

We headed out around 8am and the views were really great with fog settling in the valleys between stark rock peaks. We knew we had some via ferrata at the beginning of the day, before the trail became less technical. The trail as we got started was pretty decent…

We started down the trail and walked for a bit less than an hour before entering a technical stretch of the trail. There was via ferrata on this section, but was more technical and more exposed than Beardoh was comfortable with.

Ultimately, we turned around and put together an alternative route that avoided the technical sections. This is what we will aim to do as we progress further on the trail. We knew the hike would have this potential as we planned the trip this spring, but luckily, Slovenia has a lot of trails cross crossing the mountains. Also, there is not too many more stretches that have grade 3 difficulty, requiring helmet, via ferrata equipment.

We found a trail which required us dropping about 3,600 feet in about two and a half hours, but the trail was listed as “easy”. We called to several huts down the trail to see if they had any space for tonight, but they were booked, since today is a Saturday. We ended up deciding to go down anyways with the idea that we would find some accommodations once we got down to a road.

The trail down was well switchbacked and easy as advertised. There were quite a few other folks on the trail going up to the hut where we had just slept. As we dropped down out of the alpine zone, we got back into the forest where we had a lot of shade from the trees. The downhill felt like it went on forever, but eventually we made it down to the road. We were able to get an early dinner at a hut and accommodations quite close to the trail.