A story of the Tatra

Świnica 2301m, P356m, High Tatra, Poland/Slovakia - photo Mark Trengove

Piotr Mielus recounts three decades of listing and exploring the Tatra mountains

I have read two memoirs about prominence research: Ups and Downs by Eric Yeaman, and Compiling the Welsh P15s by Myrddyn Phillips. My first impression was – it is about me! My struggles with hill-classification were close to these Scottish and Welsh experiences.

It must be stated that, without a background in peak-bagging in Britain, my mountain research wouldn’t be the same. I have received two strong UK-based incentives: to join hill-walking and climbing experience with orographical analysis.

My first British experience came in late 1994 when I was in England for my Tempus studies in finance at the University of Staffordshire in Stoke-on-Trent. The second appeared in my life in mid 2005 when I discovered a Peaklist web-page, with Mark Trengove’s list of P150m peaks in the Tatra Mountains.

Let’s start with the first incentive.

Taking a decision what foreign studies course to choose, I had alternative opportunities: the Aarhus programme in Denmark, and Erasmus in Rotterdam, Netherlands. My final decision was obvious – only Staffordshire offers some mountains in the neighbourhood!

In my first few days there I enrolled in both the Hill Walkers and the Rock Climbing Clubs. With the first I visited my first Welsh hill – Moel Siabod In Snowdonia; with the latter – gritstone crags on the Roaches, in the Peak District, England. I was delighted with the beauty of the landscape – grassy windblown slopes full of sheep and picturesque rocks.

At the same time I visited a bookstore in Hanley to buy some Ordnance Survey (the British mapping agency) maps. There I spotted the marvelous book – “The High Mountains of Britain and Ireland” by Irvine Butterfield. It was too expensive for me to buy, so I visited the bookstore from time to time,  viewing the beautiful pictures and reading the route descriptions in this book. Here I found a sentence that astonished me – that as well as Munro mountains there are Munro Tops. A definition of being 'a mountain' was something that had bothered me for more than two years at that time.

In early 1992 I prepared my first personal list of the highest peaks in the Tatra mountains. All the highest peaks are on the Slovak side of the border. Having this in mind, I suspect that the date was strictly connected with the re-opening of the Czechoslovak border in 1991. Czechoslovakia was closed for Polish tourists in 1980 as a communist government in Prague was afraid of the influence of the Polish Solidarity democratic movement on local dissidents. The fall of communism allowed a restitution of normal relations between the two countries. I had the first opportunity to visit the Slovak Tatra and started to prepare hiking plans in the highest part of the massif.

The first list was based on a bizarre altitude criterion with a height threshold set at 8000ft. Why was the British imperial measure used by a student in “metric” Poland? In order to explain this absurdity, we have to go back to the mid 1980s.

In 1983 as a 10-year-old kid I started hiking in the Tatra mountains. It was a time of a great success for Polish climbers in the Himalaya and Karakoram, the golden era of first winter ascents on 8000-meter peaks and of the famous Messner v Kukuczka race to collect the Crown of the Himalaya. All hiking kids in Poland wanted to be like Kukuczka and Wielicki. To be closer to my heroes, I started to recalculate the Tatra heights in feet. In my ancient hiking notes there is a sentence “we started from Morskie Oko hut (4600) to climb Rysy (8200)”. Through this incantation I could touch a world of much higher mountains.

Apparently, this magical story was still in my head when I asked a peculiar question – how many 8000ft peaks are there in the Tatra mountains? And then came the next question – what is a definition of a 'mountain'?

At that time I had very limited access to altitude data: maps were inaccurate, with the best map of the Slovak Tatra at 1:50k scale. However, I was the lucky owner of two detailed guidebooks – a Nyka (1972) for tourists and Paryski (1955-1984) for climbers. In these books I could find the altitudes of major peaks and passes.

I listed all summits with a height over 2438m (equal to 8000ft) and started to think which of them deserved to be in my list. I came up with an idea that an independent peak should be significantly higher than the surrounding terrain. I assumed 100 meters as a natural metric threshold. It was not yet the “scientific” definition of prominence – certainly I was not able at that time to calculate the correct prominence if the key col was very remote from the mountain. But it was enough for the majority of Tatra peaks where the key col is nearby.

Using this method I prepared the initial list of 'Tatra 8000ers'. It counted 14 peaks, but I made two errors. I had no data for the altitude of the key saddles for Batizovský štít (P87m) and Pyšný štít (P123m). Subjectively, I included the first one and excluded the latter. It was a mistake that I corrected a few years later - thanks to altimeter measurements.

After returning to Poland in mid-1995, I decided to prepare the list of all Tatra peaks with a prominence of 100m (so in British terminology – the HuMPs). I treated it as a target for my mountaineering activity. The list counted 67 summits and was published in a mountaineering journal “Góry” in March 1998 as “Korona Tatr” ('the Crown of the Tatra'). I mentioned in the article 14 'Tatra 8000ers', but I treated it as a joke! The number of the peaks was identical to the '8000ers' of the Himalaya, so it appeared a nice coincidence to me.

Nowadays I regret this idea. It caused human pressure on these particular peaks when collecting the “Great Crown” (a Polish abbreviation is WKT) started to be fashionable among hikers and guides. This is in contrast to the “Full Crown”, which is much more challenging. It is worth saying that after more than a quarter-century from the publication, I am aware of just 22 peak-baggers who have completed the "Full Crown" (including two Slovaks: Ondrej Sádovský and Dominik Hančík). The first one was Władysław Cywiński, the climber with a record number of 6200 Tatra trips in 54 years, who completed all Tatra P100m summits (certainly not knowing about it) in 1985. The idea only became popular just a few years ago. In the beginning, scarcely anyone understood the mathematics of prominence. I talked with many “Tatra experts” and they were very skeptical about the idea of defining independent peaks.

Meanwhile I climbed all the peaks on my list. It happened finally in 2009. I revisited the list, extending it initially to 72 and, later, to 76 peaks. The number increased as I measured with altimeter and GPS more key cols that were deep enough to select the peak as a P100m (now, due to Lidar corrections, the list is a bit shorter at 74 peaks). However, my mountain activity was isolated and I could not find anyone to talk about my prominence ideas. It changed in 2005 and the incentive came again from the British Isles.

So let’s talk about the second incentive.

Accidentally, in May 2005 I found Aaron Maizlish’s Peaklist website. It was a shock for me – it occurred that there are thousands of peak-baggers around the world. So I stopped feeling weird!.

Here I learned that Mark Trengove, together with Eberhard Jurgalski and Jonathan de Ferranti, elaborated the list of Tatra “Marilyns”. I joined the team, and in July 2005 we published together the full P100m list on the Europeaklist website. In December 2005 I published the results of this study in an article in a journal “Magazyn Górski ”.

I had a strong incentive to work more on the subject. In early 2008 I published on Europeaklist the list of P100m-Poland and P200m-Slovakia. All was done in a traditional way based on paper maps and studying contour lines. The work on that lasted almost two years. However, the lists had numerous omissions and errors that is inevitable using manual identification for peaks and cols. It was corrected when Geoportal maps were published a few years later (scans of topographic maps with better contour lines). Nowadays we can improve the lists using modern Lidar digital maps.

I described the general P100m analysis in a quarterly of the Tatra National Park (Autumn 2019). In this article I also presented the concept of “crowns of basins” that consist in collecting all P100m hills located within the particular drainage basin (in the surrounding of the Tatras there are four fundamental basins: Orava, Upper Dunajec, Poprad and Upper Wah).

After finishing prominence lists for Poland and Slovakia, I focused on the Tatra again. My next target was to list all P10m points in the massif. I started with the data printed in the Orto-Foto satellite atlas issued in 2005 by Geosystems at a good scale: 1:15.000. It was – for those times – the best collection of names (oronimes) and heights that had not been published in earlier sources. The first list counted 650 points, and for the next 10 years was extended to 1050 points. On my disk I have more than 100 versions of the file so it was updated by a few newly discovered points almost every month. How were the new points discovered?

In the times “before Lidar”, the only way to find a new peak was to go for a walk with an altimeter or GPS, climb it and measure the height difference between the summit and the relevant col. The discoveries were rather accidental – if you see from one crag the other one, you go for it next time to verify its prominence.

And then came Lidar – laser measurement performed from the air and processed to digital maps with contours every 1 meter. It was a revolution!

The first Lidar data I obtained was in June 2014, thanks to the assistance of a GIS specialist and a mountain guide Michał Polański - my compliments to him. They related to the Polish side of the border so covered just 20% of the massif. Slovak data I obtained in September 2019 and the mysterious world of hidden crags was revealed. After numerous months of intense work with the data, I had in front of my eyes the complete list of 1347 Tatra P10m (with a careful threshold set at 9.5m). It was in parallel verified by Rafał Kozubek with more precise LAS data in December 2020. The saga of relative height analysis in the Tatra Mountains was finished.

The results of Lidar measurements in the Tatra mountains were published in a quarterly of the Tatra National Park (Spring 2021). Moreover, my research articles regarding this subject have been recently accepted by scientific journals in Poland (Prace Geograficzne and Folia Turistica). It is a sign that prominence-based analysis of the mountains finally entered the mainstream and is not an eccentric niche anymore.

Last, but not least – one needs to know that exploration of off-trail Tatra mountains is a challenge. It seems ridiculous, as the massif is tiny (20km x 50km) and has a dense network of marked trails. Moreover, it is described in detail, as it has been explored since the 19th century by numerous wanderers, scientists and climbers. You can find abundant literature in Polish, Slovak, German and Hungarian – languages of all inhabitants of the region in the past centuries. However, nowadays its interior can bring a lot of surprises.

Firstly, activity in some regions has been illegal for 70 years when the National Park was established. Secondly, the lower areas are hardly accessible due to windfall, thickets and dense fields of dwarf pine. In effect, some parts of the massif, even close to civilization, resemble a jungle. It is enough to say that some targets are accessible only in winter – when snow covers dwarf pine areas and you can roam with touring skis or snow shoes.

In effect, it happens that, in 21st century in the middle of Europe, we have managed to do “the first known ascents”. Let’s enumerate a few of them: Wołoszyńska Strażnica 1880m/P11m (2006), Lapisdurowy Mnich 1239m/P17m (2009), Skrajna Kozieniecka Turnia 1238m/P16m (2016), Zadnia Siwoczolska Turnia 1110m/P16m (2016), Niżnia Smytniańska Turniczka 1438m/P14m (2016), Wielka Zagonna Strażnica 1512m/P23m (2017), Turnia nad Cyganką 1109m/P41m (2017), Skrajna Gajdoszowa Turnia 1056m/P13m (2019), Skrajna Kocia Lalka 997m/P10m (2019), Wielka Turnia pod Kopą 1391m/P16m (2020), Folwarska Baszta 1716m/P11m (2023), Czaplowa Turnia 996m/P11m (2023) and many more. Apart from that, the exploration brought the first winter ascents and identification of numerous virgin crags.

Here I want to thank all the members of the exploration team, but particularly two top surveyors: Rafał Kozubek (Rafik) and Krzysztof Krowicki (Świster) for their fieldwork and numerous first ascents. Additional expressions of gratitude go to Grzegorz Folta for his measurements in remote climbing areas.