Foggy Făgăraș (pt. 1): March 7th - March 8th, 2024
The first train from Brasov to Porumbacu station left at a quarter past 6 AM, so we woke up to an early alarm and went to the edge of dark and quiet old-town Brasov to catch our Bolt to the train station. I couldn't shake the feeling of forgetting something; it felt odd to travel with just one backpack each instead of our usual 6 bags, but given the moderate hike in to the Cabana Negoiu I was happy to only have a single piece of luggage and leave the rest at the Airbnb we'd be returning to in about a week. And these backpacks still bursted with supplies - mainly snacks, since even though we'd made peace with giving in and buying dinners and breakfasts from the mountain hut, we still needed 7 days of lunches. And chocolate bars.
We had six nights reserved at Cabana Negoiu, a mountain refuge perched on a forested ridge below Varful Negoiu, Romania's second highest peak, in the Fagaras Mountains, a subrange of the Carpathians that served as a natural barrier between historical Saxon/Hungarian Transylvania and Slavic Wallachia. This was supposed to give us 3 days for ice climbing and maybe some easy winter mountaineering and 2 rest days (lesson learned from Norway - rest days are important), but between 70 degree days in Bucharest, the lack of skiing, assurances from strangers that Romania didn't get an ice climbing season this winter, and a snow-free hike to about 1650 meters in February, we weren't super bullish about the prospects for winter sports.
On one hand, the dreary morning lifted our hopes a little bit, since damp and cool weather down on the plains might mean colder temperatures and snow up high. On the other, as our train trundled through rural Romania quite slowly, as rural Romanian trains do, the rain streaking along the windows against grey skies and stickly black trees dampened our spirits as well. I unsuccessfully tried to snooze as we stopped to pick up uniformed school-kids from small beige train stations speckled with accumulated dirt, or stops that seemed to be nothing more than isolated concrete pads raised up to meet the level of the train, before disgorging them in Fagaras, the only real town we passed through in the three-and-a-half hour train ride.
We ourselves got off at one of those shabby beige stations, Porumbacu de Jos, starting to see why maybe that guy in Bucharest had talked down about his country's trains but also still super grateful we could actually get around without a car. Mostly, anyway - we texted "Mr. Nicolae", who was apparently the regular shuttle driver for people that come in on the train and want to get to Cabana Negoiu, that we'd arrived, and after 15 minutes of increasingly anxious waiting (since he'd replied he'd be there in 5) a boxy red car pulled up and a friendly but brusque woman got out to help us load our backpacks. It left me wondering, "Who is actually Mr. Nicolae??"
"Mr. Nicolae" sped away from the train station, racing through another village and a mess of empty stalls that must be a buzzing plaza of tourist traps in the summer, before turning up a rough forest road and moderating her speed only slightly to account for rocks, blind corners, and mud puddles that covered 2/3rds of the road. As promised, we arrived at an abandoned quarry and she left us with the bags, telling us to message again when we needed a pickup. Well, there's no service... so hopefully we can manage to ping you from the hut and get the timing right? But of course Mr. Nicolae disappeared before we could clarify that point. We shuddered a bit at the thought of walking all the way down.
But we'd made it! Time to start hiking. Since the Fagaras mountains appeared to be really popular with backpackers, we honestly found it pretty cool that you could start from Brasov (or even Bucharest) and get out here for a trip without needing to drive your own car.
From the old quarry we started following what we thought would be a trail but mostly seemed to be a rough and muddy two-track; thankfully, occasional signs confirmed we were on the right track through the misty forest. At a junction shortly before the cabin we decided to go check out Cascada Serbota, one of the potential ice climbing spots. To no great surprise, we didn't find any ice there, just a very pretty stream of water mildly flowing down two rocky steps before making a turn and tumbling down a third. It definitely could have shaped up into a really nice climb, but not for us, not this year.
As we trudged up the last vertical meters to the hut things did start to change, and before long a nice blanket of about 6 inches of snow kept our feet out of the mud. I rounded the final curve but had to wait for Susan in order to confirm with her - were we really seeing the "mountain hut"? On top of the ridge rose a massive rectangle of rubble masonry, 3 and a half stories high, with huge glass windows staring out towards the mountains on either side. We approached cautiously, unsure of where to find the entrance to the behemoth and worried that if we tried the wrong door the structure might rumble awake and squish us.
A man in a blue cotton hoodie splitting firewood in an attached workshop noted our confusion and gruffly directed us around to the other side, which took us past an end of the building with impressive windows stretching from the ground to the eaves of the roof; this side also featured a much-less-impressive set of scaffolding, which could be charitably described as "improvised" or more accurately described as "terrifying" and "not OSHA-compliant", presumably for some paint or restoration work.
At the front a massive banner announced that, yes, we had arrived at Cabana Negoiu, and proudly declared the elevation of 1561 meters to drive home the improbability of this structure being here. Another man with short blond hair and a scruffy face made handsome through years of hard work outside waited on this side, taking a smoke break from what I assume was some sort of exhausting labor - or was this the same guy who had been splitting wood? Thus began our perpetual confusion as to how many people were staffing this place and whether we'd been talking to the same or different people. We said hello and he said "Welcome" and then not much else happened, so we dropped the packs to have a look around outside.
The clouds had started to lift and reveal the Fagaras Mountains standing above, and while everything below us looked melted out and ready for spring it certainly seemed wintry at the summits, fresh snow gleaming sharply under the bright sun. We found the old Cabana Negoiu, which was much closer to my idea of a "hut" - four walls and a roof to cover a sweaty pile of sleeping mountaineers. Now it was filled with junk and detritus that hadn't made it into the new cabin.
We wandered back to the main building, where the same guy was finishing either the same cigarette or another in a chain, and managed to stumble through an interaction and convey that we had a reservation for a basic 2-person room. He led us inside, past the bar and dance floor equipped with a professional-level DJ sound and lighting system, into a grand dining room empanelled all around with strips of shiny enameled wood and dimly illuminated by warm yellow LED lights that threw off flickering pixels in imitation of oil lamps. I stopped in my tracks to admire the 40 - 50 gallon aquarium glowing neon-blue in one wall; I've never seen that many goldfish on a mountain before. Some old logs smoldered in a giant maroon ceramic fireplace on one side, and on the other pink and blue faux-neon strips highlighted chalkboards scrawled with important points about dinner. The whole place had a cyberpunk lounge vibe, filtered through the fever dreams of a lonely woodsman. But in a kind of charming and homey sort of way.
A little bit of bumbling later and the caretaker had figured out which room to stick us into. He tried to ask how long we were staying, and we tried to say an amount of time, but we ended up settling on "after the weekend" which worked for us since we figured we might find out the ice was gone the next day and then roll out relatively soon. But then again, maybe it'd be worth it to hang out in this ridgeline disco ship for a few days regardless?
On our way to the stairs we passed another furnace, where they shoved a bag of coal one or two times a day to keep the building heated, went up to the third floor, and found the cozy private room we'd sprung for in lieu of beds in a dorm; two small beds, one small table, just enough space for our backpacks, and a coat rack to hang up all our wet stuff. Luxury! The window opened out to the enclosed balcony/sunroom, which we opened right away since that bag of coal sure did its job and kept our room HOT. We laid on the beds to rest our feet for a bit before heading down to figure out dinner.
Dinner was tricky to figure out. The hand-written and barely-legible menu offered a few Romanian staple dishes that we wouldn't have known regardless, and we were the only guests in the whole refuge, so they didn't exactly seem set up to serve dinner and we felt like a bit of a nuisance. Eventually us and the guardian settled on two plates of "MBS", which ended up being a pretty delicious heap of polenta, white salty cheese, and fried eggs. After a few dropped crumbs we noticed that the dim lighting meant you couldn't see how dirty the white tablecloths were.
Even as the only guests, Susan still made a friend at dinner - a handful of a kitten who absolutely demanded attention (and a few bites off your plate at dinner) but repaid pets with purrs tenfold. The furball followed us up to our room and despite being adorable, kneading my blanket with ecstasy and vibrating all the while, we decided it was best to kick it out before getting some sleep.
Breakfast the next morning was a bit easier to navigate - there was no menu and we knew the Romanian word for "breakfast" - but the hutkeeper didn't serve it until 8:30 so we got out the door a little later than we'd prefer for a day of outdoor shenanigans. Although we were willing to cut him some slack since we were now convinced he was the only person staffing the place and the morning had a lot of other important chores, like starting up the fire to keep us all from freezing. Some nice fried eggs, more white cheese, and, thank goodness, a few fresh veggies were our fuel for the day. We shouldered our heavy bags, said goodbye to the kitten, and plodded out the door in search of some ice to climb.
In the thick grey fog of the morning we had an important decision to make - how would we try to get to the ice? Our scant and questionably-translated beta from online advised that the normal "summer road" was exposed to numerous avalanche paths in the winter, and recommended the alternative winter path through the bottom of the valley. And on our map numerous exclamation points placed along the summer trail indicated "difficult passages", and it also advised against that trail in the winter. Yet the "winter path" wasn't really a trail, so to speak; unmarked on the map, it would mean bushwhacking and traveling cross-country through snow in poor visibility without a really firm idea of where we were going, and also hiking farther with some extra uphill.
Anxious as the time grew later, we decided to take a shot at the normal summer route in hopes of a quicker approach. It didn't take long for the exclamation points to explain themselves, though, as we came upon narrow sections of path scratched out of the side of the ridge and banked out with steep slopes of snow, somehow simultaneously firm but also sugary and friable, that hid the cables and hand-lines that normally offered hikers security against the 20-30 foot drops off the side. We pressed on at first, traversing and climbing around snowbanks to get across the metal-grate bridges that plugged the gaps in the trail where the cliffs didn't offer enough purchase, but after a short time we both realized this sort of thing really warranted crampons. Armed with the spikes on our feet, we continued for maybe about another 10 minutes before coming upon a particularly nasty-looking section ("It all depends on what's around that corner...") and I got spooked enough to call that we should turn around. A little bit of heavy breathing later and we were back at the picnic tables near the hut, almost lunch time and no closer to any icefalls.
Discouraged but stubborn as ever, we decided to give the winter path a try, but left most of our heavy climbing gear behind to make things a little easier; we knew it was far too late to hope to get any climbing in, so this was more of a scouting mission. We pretended to follow a trail down the steep, wooded hillside outside the cabin, until, to our surprise, we did hit an actual trail along the creek in the valley bottom. This continued for a bit, past a few mystery structures, before petering out under snow and blown down trees - time to tromp through snow. We encountered some more ruins and an old stone hut that somehow seemed to be the source of the stream, and reasoned that it must be the home of a witch and opted not to try to peek inside.
I occasionally broke through the crust of firm snow on top, and Susan mostly post-holed, so it was slow going as the terrain got steeper and the fog got denser and we grew less certain about the way forward. Eventually we came up against a set of cliffs with a waterfall in the middle, tried to tack up right, and basically hit a dead end. Disappointed and tired, with the flowing waterfall to our side echoing everyone's comments that there was no ice to climb up here anyway, we turned around and trudged back to the hut, defeated and damp.
Things were changing back at the cabana; groups of people kept rolling in and it took us too long to realize it was a Friday night. Suddenly maybe the little bit extra we'd paid for a private room was actually worth it. Another man appeared to help take care of the hut, definitely different from the first one (or two?) we'd been interacting with, and with a few more guests it seemed like less of a burden for us to need dinner. I tried to unlock some different food but didn't ask for the right thing and we ended the night by trying to figure out the next day’s plans over two more plates of MBS.
I had to look up a MBS recipe - looks good!!
ReplyDeleteI couldn't even remember what the acronym stood for. Just make sure to use the saltiest white cheese you can find 😋
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