SLOVENIA
personality of the manager, or managers, and the setting. The following evening, having puffed our way through a short but challenging 4.5-mile section, we find a winning blend of the two. Gathering cloud swallows the sun as we climb almost to the summit of Mount Stol, the 7,336ft high point of the Karawanks. Suddenly, a mini blizzard is whipping across our faces, flakes of ice merging with the delicate white flowers sprinkled over the high mountain slopes. There, on an exposed outcrop just down
from the peak, is the faintest of outlines. The wind brings with it the smell of wood smoke. Fighting to stay on our feet, we push on towards it, prise ourselves through the door and step into the snug serenity of Prešernova koča na Stolu. Warming the cabin’s single communal room, with its partitioned tables and checkered tile floor, is a huge, wood-fed heater encased in lime-green ceramic tiles engraved with viticultural scenes. The centrepiece of Slovene houses in a pre-central-heating age, these ovens would occupy a corner in each room to evenly spread the warmth. “Both my grandmothers had one,” says Bostjan affectionately. Hut managers Jožko and Kata Šumanovac,
From left: Prešernova koča na Stolu hut, with the Julian Alps in the distance; Simon Koščak, manager of Roblekov Dom hut, serving schnapps made from local herbs
a retired couple, welcome us warmly. We sit with our backs to the tiles as a beaming Kata serves us restorative coffees and apple strudel. From a little bed beneath my feet emerges the couple’s Pekingese and Maltese mix, Poopie, who fusses around the newcomers as Kata fondly chides her. Her name, we’re reassured to learn, was given rather than earned.
Built in 1909, the hut was named for the
de facto national poet France Prešeren, who wrote the lyrics to Slovenia’s fervently internationalist national anthem. It was razed to the ground by partisans in the Second World War, preventing the Germans from capitalising on its elevated, and thus strategic, position, then rebuilt in the 1960s and enlarged in the 1980s. This eventful history is catalogued in a series of framed pictures, over which I linger before retiring to my bunk and sleeping the heavy sleep of the hiker as the icy wind rattles the dorm windows. Save for Jakob, a studious Swiss on a trans-Alpine, multi-stage hike from Vienna to Nice, we’re the only guests.
Dawn summit If you don’t like the weather in the Slovenian mountains, to bastardise Mark Twain, just wait a while. So it proves as we wake to a dazzling sunrise clawing its way up through the peaks to the east and flooding the plain far below with a soft light. The clarity is extraordinary: with my naked eye, I can pick out the burgundy roof and white tower of the island church on Lake Bled. A steep, craggy path takes us the last few
hundred feet to Stol’s summit, where a smooth limestone slab is marked with ‘Oe’ (Austria) on one side of a slender line and ‘RS’ (Republic of Slovenia) on the other. Already here is a lone hiker. I’m momentarily puzzled. It’s not yet 6am and the closest other accommodation is multiple miles away. Anticipating this
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