Musala

Worth a detour

From the gondola above Borovets it is a serious but non-technical walk to the roof of the peninsula, past mountain huts and glacial lakes. Start at first light, check the forecast twice, and turn around if the cloud comes down. It is about four hours up from the top station and the same back, and the last gondola down is not a time to guess at.

Story

Background

At 2,925 metres Musala is the highest point in Bulgaria, in the Rila, and in the whole Balkan peninsula. The Yastrebets gondola lifts you out of Borovets in about twenty minutes and nearly five kilometres of cable, and puts you on the ridge at 2,363 metres. From there it is roughly four hours on foot to the summit, past the Musala hut and the Everest shelter, across the cirque of the Musalenski lakes, with a last rocky pull to the top. Icy Lake sits at 2,709 metres on the way — the highest lake on the peninsula.

The summit is not a viewpoint pavilion. It carries a working high-mountain meteorological station and an atmospheric observatory run by the Academy of Sciences, and the boxy buildings and masts are the first thing you see. This is also the coldest place in the country: the mean annual temperature is below freezing, snow lies for around two hundred days a year, and the record low is past minus thirty.

The gondola is what makes the mountain dangerous. It converts a long approach into a day trip, and people start up in trainers with a bottle of water at eleven in the morning. It remains four hours each way at altitude, on exposed ground with very little shelter, and afternoon thunderstorms and fog are routine in summer. For a period after 1949 the peak carried Stalin's name; it got Musala back in 1962.