First Hill Climb of the Trip - Polczakówka

Having arrived in southern Poland, we decided to take a short break from driving towards Zakopane. We quickly found a random trail close by to have a short hike. It's close to a town in Poland named Rabka-Zdroj, and the hill is Polczakówka, on which there should be a watchtower.

The climb to the hill was not long. The altitude gain was only about 150 meters or so, but it was very steep right off the bat. My body was not used to such strenuous exercise yet, and my heart rate quickly reached over 150bpm.
This is a shot I took in the middle of this steep climb. You can somewhat see how steep the trail was. Well, in a photo it doesn't look that steep at all.😅

Pretty soon we reached the observation tower on top of the hill. Such beautiful aerial views we saw there. The hilly landscapes all around us were amazing.

The tower was roofed, and we were so damn lucky because a thunderstorm rolled in just as we arrived on top of the hill. It started pouring down rain like crazy. It also meant that I was able to get some interesting mountain shots with this specific kind of weather.

Layers of hills in the rain.

We were not yet in the Tatra Mountains, so the altitude in this spot was around 550m, with some hills reaching 700-800m over sea level.

Soon the thunderstorm passed, and we were able to see some blue sky and sunshine again.

We were now able to move away, but we decided to find a short loop trail through the hills so we could see some more of the surrounding areas and not have to go back the same way. Having foun the trail, it looked something like that.

After a little while, we reached the town we needed to walk through to get back to the car. It took quite a while to do that. We were hit by another thunderstorm and heavy downpour again, but we were able to hide out in one of the construction stores. We never imagined that we would end up in a construction store looking at products on our hiking trip 😅.

In total, this hike was about 7 kilometers. More than we thought we had time for. The walk through the town took a while.
After we started driving again, we drove a couple of hours straight to the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland and the Slovakian border. This is where the serious mountains began and where we did many amazing hikes. I will start to blog about those very soon!

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