Into the Julian Alps: Viševnik, Bled, and on to Mojstrana

Bicycle tourists had warned us that the direct road from Bohinj to Bled was narrow and busy with traffic. You can take the train instead, we were told. However, that route was never even on my radar. Another option is the 900m climb to Rudno Polje which gives access to the highest mountains in the Julian Alps. The choice was obvious.

We had a few kms of flat riding

before the 15km unpaved uphill to Rudno Polje.

We got our first peak at the high peaks. 😉

For the first time we were spending the night in Triglav NP, Slovenia’s only national park. Put off by the 122 euro/night at an ugly hotel in Rudno Polje, we opted for camping. It’s illegal, and we’d be warned to be careful because the fines are high. We found a well-hidden spot.

The next day, for the 4th day in a row, we got to the highest elevation of our trip (it took another 10 days to break that record again). Ferda and I got up early and were at the summit of Viševnik at about 8:30am. You can see that it hadn’t clouded up yet. I think that might be Triglav, the highest peak in ex-Yugoslavia, in the back middle right of the photo. Ferda chose to turn around here.

This photo:

is about the same, but it more clearly shows the hike/scramble that I did for the next few hours — head along down and right on the ridge in front, follow the top of the grass, and scramble straight up to the summit of Mali Draški. Then I went left down the ridge behind in the shade to the saddle and continued up to the pyramidal peak with no bushes at the top — Veliki Draški, 2240m. The route off was to continue left down the ridge to a saddle (not in photo) and follow a good trail back to Rudno Polje.

I met Stanko at the top of Mali Draški.

We followed much the same route to the saddle between the two Draškis. I started up, and Stanko continued across to more quickly summit Ablanca.

I waited over 30 minutes on the Veliki Draški summit for the clouds to clear and a better view of Triglav, but this was about as good as it got:

It was a fun morning excursion, the first mountain scrambling I’ve done since leaving Antalya.

Back at the bikes we were amazed at how fast the downhill was to Bled. The pavement was perfect. At the bottom of the steepest section we stopped for beers in Zatrnik with Vincent and Nils.

If you’ve seen any tourist information about Slovenia, you know you have to go to Bled. Everyone else knows this as well. We stayed one night and got the requisite photo.

Our route the next day took us through Jesenice, and we ended up in a brilliant campsite on the Sava Dolinka (spoiler: two weeks later and we’re still on the Sava Dolinka). The Sava Dolinka and the Sava from Bohinj (Sava Bohinjka) join near Bled to form the Sava which I wrote about in Zagreb.

The weather, however, prevented us from enjoying the campsite as much as we would have liked.

Here are a couple photos from when it wasn’t raining:

We continued uphill on the wonderful rails to trails bicycle path to Mojstrana.

One of our goals before arriving in the Dolomites (another spoiler!) was to try a couple short, easy via ferrata. Ferda and I did our first ever via ferrata here, in Mojstrana.

That was fun. We were rewarded with our first peak at the high peaks of the Julian Alps from the north side. Looks like there’s more to do here…