Kowadło (Golden Mountains)

Kowadło (989 m above sea level) is a border summit in the southern part of the Golden Mountains (Góry Złote), rising above the village of Bielice in the Stronie Śląskie municipality. It lies within the Śnieżnik Landscape Park and represents the range in the Crown of Polish Mountains and the Crown of Lower Silesian Mountains, and the shortest ascent from Bielice takes under an hour.

Why Kowadło

The Czechs call the peak Kovadlina, and its German name was Schmiedekoppe. Kowadło is regarded as the highest summit of the Golden Mountains, though this is a matter of convention. The highest mountain in the Czech part of the range, the Rychlebské hory, is Smrk (1125 m), one of whose tops lies right on the border. On top of that, the boundary between the Golden Mountains and the Bialskie Mountains comes from an old German division and is not accepted by every geographer. Kowadło made it into the Crown because it meets one key condition: a waymarked trail leads to its summit.

On the summit

The domed top is covered with young spruces, between which gneiss outcrops emerge, and the Polish–Czech border runs along the ridge. The small summit clearing itself offers few views. A better panorama of Bielice and the Golden and Bialskie Mountains opens from a viewpoint just below the top, and in clear weather you can see as far as the Sudeten foothills. Roe deer, red deer, wild boar and martens live in the spruce forests, and bilberries dominate the undergrowth.

The trail from Bielice

The walk starts at the free car park by the State Forests forester's lodge in Bielice, at the end of the road through the Biała Lądecka valley. The green trail first follows a wide forest road (about 30 minutes), then climbs steeply through the woods (about 10 minutes) to the border ridge with its boundary posts. Here the yellow trail from the Three Borders Pass joins, and about a quarter of an hour later you reach the summit. The whole ascent takes about 55 minutes, and the round trip about 1.5 hours according to the signposts.

Tripto tips

• If you go up on the yellow trail you will pass a few viewpoints, while the green trail is gentler for the descent.
• From the same forester's lodge a green trail leads to Rudawiec (1112 m), the Bialskie Mountains' entry in the Crown, so both peaks are easy to do in a single day.
• Longer and more interesting routes to Kowadło start in Nowy Gierałtów and on the Czech side, for example in Žulová and Petříkov.
• The trail from Bielice has occasionally been closed for forestry work, so check announcements from Stronie Śląskie municipality and the Lądek-Zdrój forest district before you go. The Biała Lądecka valley once carried the Salt Road, along which salt was transported from Moravia to Kłodzko.