Valley of the Five Polish Ponds

The Valley of the Five Polish Ponds is a high mountain basin in the High Tatras, home to the largest and deepest lake in the Tatra Mountains. Despite the name there are actually six lakes, and above the Front Pond stands Poland's highest mountain hut, at 1,672 m. It is a full-day trip for fit hikers, not a roadside stroll.

A landscape shaped by ice

The valley is about 4 km long and 2 km wide, lying between roughly 1,625 and 1,900 m. A glacier carved it, leaving granite benches, fields of boulders and lakes covering about 61 ha in total. They are the Great, Rear, Black, Small and Front Polish Ponds, plus the seasonal Wole Oko ("Ox Eye"), the smallest, which is probably why it was left out of the name. The old folk name for the valley was simply Pięciostawy, "Five Ponds".

The largest is the Great Polish Pond (Wielki Staw Polski): about 34 ha in area, 79.3 m deep according to 1934 surveys and almost a kilometre long. It is the deepest and longest lake in the Tatras and the third deepest in Poland. It holds about 13 million m³ of water, roughly a third of all the water in Tatra lakes. An old guidebook claimed that Kraków's St Mary's Church, tower and all, would disappear beneath its surface.

What to see

Highlights of the trip:

• Siklawa – a waterfall of about 40 m pouring over the rock step at the valley's mouth,
• the Great Polish Pond, with views of Miedziane and the Świnica ridge,
• a stone shepherds' hut on the north-west shore of the Great Pond, dated to the 17th century and considered the oldest surviving building of its kind in the Tatras,
• the PTTK mountain hut by the Front Pond, built in 1948–1953 and named after Leopold Świerz.

No trees grow in the valley apart from a single larch by the Great Pond. Marmots and chamois, however, are easy to spot, and rare alpine plants grow on the slopes.

History and curiosities

The first visitors arrived in the early 19th century, among them the scholar Stanisław Staszic and the poet Seweryn Goszczyński, who in 1832 described the valley as a place of "the wildest solitude". The Tatra Society built the first hut by the Small Pond in 1876. For centuries highlanders from Białka grazed their animals here, and the last cows left in 1968, a few years after the national park bought up the whole valley.

Tripto tip

The most popular approach starts at Palenica Białczańska and Mickiewicz Waterfalls, following the green trail through the Roztoka Valley: about 5.6 km, 2 hrs 30 min and 674 m of ascent. Past the Nowa Roztoka clearing the trail splits. The green option passes Siklawa over slippery, rounded boulders and takes about an hour, while the black one climbs stone steps straight to the hut in about 40 minutes. In summer it is nice to go up one way and down the other.

From Morskie Oko via Świstówka the walk takes about 2 hours, but that trail is closed from 1 December to 15 May. Allow 7–8 hours for the whole trip. Entry to the Tatra National Park is charged; before setting out, check park notices, the forecast and, in winter, the avalanche danger. The hut has about 67 beds, so it is worth booking early in season.