Located in the south eastern corner of Poland, the Bieszczady National Park borders onto Ukraine and Slovakia. I imagine getting here via public transport might be difficult but with a car, there is parking available in the National Park to be able to access the hiking trails. My friend and I came by car with the intention of leaving home at 7am. Obviously, you know that that is not what happened. We left much later and also needed to stop for fuel and food. With a 3-hour drive to even get to the National Park, we decided to push on. It was a lovely day and my friend had the day off work.

The national park is huge and is Poland’s biggest at 27,064 hectares. You need to pay to access the paths which is 8 PLN ($2-3) for a whole day access. There are 2 camping sites- Bereżki and Górna Wetlinka but other than that, there are just trail paths and also guest accommodation in the nearby town. There are local buses that run at the bottom of the mountains which will allow you to get back and forth between accommodation or the car park but there is no information regarding this on the website. There would be information at the ticket booth or you may need to contact them ahead of time (for English). Apparently it is quite busy on the weekends so get there early or try a weekday as we did.

This is a map of the national park. On this day, we covered what I marked in purple (and we returned the same way) which took us about 3 hours including stopping for breaks and a long-ish stop at the top.

There is something so inherently beautiful being somewhere in nature where it’s quiet from our modern inventions. Not a single car sound, I was in heaven. The trail starts from the road and inclines quite quicky through the forest. There are clear paths marks and as it’s a national park. There are wolves, bears and lynxes in the area too but most of them would probably be out at night.
Once past the forest area, the landscape becomes more and more barren. At the top, it feels like you a (literally) ontop of the world. It was quite rocky with scarce vegetation however, beauty can be found anywhere. There were small flowers blooming even at the top. It looks like we just missed the peak of the flowers blooming.
We came across 2 seating areas at the top which included benches to stop, eat or lie in the sun as some people were doing. It was very windy at the top so do ensure you pack a wind breaker. Despite the blue skies, the wind was quite cold on this day.
As I learnt, whilst we were walking up, we were passing people coming back down and most (if not all) said hi. My friend told me it was a thing in Poland, to greet others on hikes with the people going uphill not obliged to reply.