Climbing into Winter on Day 6

Romania is a place of endless human stories, kings and autocrats and invaders and defenders and the people caught up in all of it. But the day after walking on a church’s rampart walls, nodding at the king alongside, we headed for a place that transcends mere human concerns.

We started through farmland where cows followed their schedules for the day, for the season, in what must be bovine heaven. Fields of grain stretched oceanic in places, and the towns were filled with folklore legends and the comprehensible rural living that our bones remember. But a very different shadow was lifting crushing becoming the horizon ahead. The stone tsunami wore dark primordial green pine forests; these were the Carpathian Mountains.

The longest European mountain range outside Scandinavia, the Carpathians span seven countries, poking Austria and the Czech Republic in the west, but fully half is in Romania, where they curl a great stone hook around Transylvania. This is the true home of legends, rising in a complicated geology of Cretaceous sea floors scraped up in some places, cold granite peaks over there, and around our road that day the layered metamorphic schists that tell the history of the continent itself in their stacks.

The Carpathians have dozens of names in dozens of cultures over dozens of centuries, always replete with power, mystery, and something of menace, a place where humans know they are unimportant. Still today these pine expanses are the largest area of virgin forest in Europe, home to the greatest concentration of brown bears, wolves, lynxes, and mountain-goat chamois, living among over a third of Europe’s total plant species and a third of the bubbling mystical thermal springs. When all of Europe seems pacified under parking lots and historic boulevards, I remember the wild spaces of Romania and something inside smiles with wolf’s teeth.

The peaks aren’t high enough to cause altitude concerns, but you wouldn’t know it as the thin strip of pavement rises above the treeline and the landscape opens out and up. Everywhere is a palette of greens, dark higher up, verdant below, ranging to the buttery grass beneath our feet when we climbed out into the oxygen bath of mountain air. A hot Mediterranean summer waited below, but up here the wind was talking in its sleep about the glories of winter.

This was the Transfagarasan Pass, which British TV people named The World’s Best Road. And of course it exists within history: dynamited and laid at great human cost during the Cold War, when Romania was preparing to continue its ancestral battle against Russia and the Soviet Union. But such entities seem insubstantial when you’re surrounded by such stone, and the wind felt more like the breath of Ghengis Khan than Josef Stalin. Maybe Cronos.

After a hearty soup lunch in a mountain chalet, I perused the stalls where locals sold homemade cheese, cured meat, and a wide variety of gifts and mementos. I chose cheese packed in a shell of willow bark and a flakey pastry roll hot off the grill. Then it was time to hop back in the van and descend to the next great Romanian place to love.