A week ago I was on a hike with some friends to a peak that I've seen probably a thousands times from a town near Rila Mountains - Samokov, but I had never been there. Its name is Ivanov Kamak - 2115m and no one goes there in the summer because there is no pathway to it and it is more easily accessible in the winter because the snow covers most of the shrubs. Still someone had made a pretty decent pathway that starts near the end of the gondola lift of the ski resort Borovets, pass relatively close to that peak, than to Sokolets Peak and connects to one old pathway that ends close to a very beautiful mountain village Beli Iskar.
I offered my friends not to use the gondola but instead to use a ski piste and to go by foot, but they didn't like the idea very much , so I had to accept it and use the lift, which I usually avoid. They wanted to check if that new pathway would be suitable for mountain bikes and ski-touring but it turned out it would need some more cutting of the shrubs for these activities.
You can see here our trek, the starting point - the station of the gondola lift - Yastrebets, then the first detour to Ivanov Kamak and the second - to Sokolets Peak.
Our next small detour was to Sokolets Peak. That was my third time there, but that view would never stop to amaze me.
Although most of the time we had to walk downwards with the detour to Ivanov Kamak(without a pathway) and the endless battle with the shrubs and the creeping pine it was quite a challenging hike. When we came back we looked like we were coming back from a battle with scratches and wounds everywhere. Ok, not literally, I am exaggerating. I really enjoyed it not only because of the beautiful views, but also because it was like a full-body training but in a more natural way.
Just look at Jina. She was great! Although we even had to climb here and there she didn't give up and was more like a mountain goat than like a dog.
As I said almost no one goes there, so it is the perfect place for bears and we saw a lot of traces from them, one of them really huge and fresh ot let's say still warm just below Ivanov Kamak, so we were walking and screaming from time to time as loud as we could - Bear, Bear, we are coming! It is important to be loud in such areas, because the meeting wouldn't be pleasant neither for the bear nor for us. Btw the bears are faster than horses!
I was barefoot as usually throughout the whole hike but what surprised me this time was that after Sokolets peak, we weren't a group of mountaineers with one barefoot person, we were four barefoot hikers :)! I guess it is contagious. One of them, that I met for the first time that day, was surprised to see me walking like that on such terrain and asked me many questions about the barefoot walking and he liked the idea so much that this weekend he did a whole 8 hour difficult hike entirely barefoot and was really content to find out about this simple way to recharge yourself. And I am happy to spread the idea :)
“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”
Thank you for stopping by!