February 14, 2022

Sandstone Kingdom: Besedice Rocks

Visiting a dream-like natural maze in Bohemian Paradise.

We enter dense coniferous woods of the Besedice Rocks protected landscape area during a chilly winter day; mist completes an atmosphere, and we see the first rocks soon.

Bohemian Paradise is home to many sandstone locations; those in Besedice are not as tall as some others, but are much more densely placed.

A trail leads straight through the formations; some are just shoulder-width apart.

It forces one to look at the fascinating natural shapes in an intimate encounter.

We are safe from the winds inside the tight corridors, but the stones keep the cold in. The deeper into the rocky labyrinth we get, the more freezing it feels.

The omnipresent monochromatic snow-sprinkled walls could easily mess up one's sense of direction, mainly on a day like we had, with fog heavily diffusing the sunshine. Thankfully, the trail is mostly easy to follow. There's another challenge, though.

A meltdown hit the area a few days ago; however, sub-zero temperatures have returned since then, hardening all the running water and glazing the trail with a solid layer of ice. There are stairs leading on the top of the rocks to an observation platform, but as the stairs railings froze too, the progress is laborious. Moreover, the guardrails here are designed for shorter folks than I am; walking at the edges of those rocks, I have them at a knee height.

Still, it is worth the effort. The observation deck is higher than the trees around and offers an outlook to a valley nearby, flooded by clouds at the time.

The platform is pretty on its own, as an old pine grows up there from the rock. It reminded me of the pines at Chinese Yellow Mountain.

Now just to negotiate the stairs back down...


If you enjoyed this post, you might like my previous articles featuring remarkable rocks, like:

a trip to a valley where I expected a waterfall. There was much more than that.

Saxon Switzerland

Adrsbach

Adrspach

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Published by: Jakub Stepanovic in Stories

 

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