Kryvopillia Pass

Hoverla is visible from the verge here, which is not something you can say about many places you can drive to. The R24 between Verkhovyna and Vorokhta climbs out of the tight valley of the Chornyi Cheremosh onto an open saddle somewhere between 970 and 1,013m — sources disagree, and the figure matters less than what the height buys.

This is a watershed: rain landing on one side of the ridge ends up in the Prut, rain on the other in the Chornyi Cheremosh. The hills here are low and rounded rather than tall enough to block the distance, so nothing stands between you and the Chornohora wall to the southwest.

Reading the horizon

Hoverla — 2,061m, the highest mountain in Ukraine — is the broad shoulder at the centre of that wall, the other two-thousanders ranged either side. Much nearer, dark with spruce, is the Kostrych ridge. Turn towards Vorokhta and the two sharp cones on the skyline are Syniak and Khomiak. Directly below, Kryvopillia is scattered down its slopes in the Hutsul pattern: every house on its own patch of ground, no street to speak of.

Don't stop at the first spot where the mountains appear. Walk fifty metres along the saddle in either direction and the foreground changes entirely; one of those angles gives you Chornohora without a branch across it. Weddings get photographed here for exactly that reason.

The market on the saddle

A line of stalls has grown up at the high point, run by families from the villages below. What is on them is local work rather than imported tat: carved wooden barrel-mugs, lizhnyky — the thick woollen blankets woven across Hutsulshchyna — knitted wool socks, hand-thrown pottery, embroidery, rushnyky and gerdany, the beaded collars Hutsul women still wear.

Bring cash; card payment is patchy and so is the signal. This is somebody's working day rather than an attraction, so bargain lightly or not at all.

Crooked field

The pass borrows its name from the village, and the village name says what it means: kryve pole, crooked field — a sloping, uneven scrap of ploughland, which up here is the only kind there is. Kryvopillia was settled around 1899 and went by Kryvopole until 1958. Two of its sons are still named locally: the screenwriter Vasyl Portiak, and Ivan Rybaruk, priest and writer.

The better-known village is Kryvorivnia, a short drive past Verkhovyna. Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky stayed there in 1910 and wrote Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors the following year; Ivan Franko summered in the same valley. Much of what the outside world thinks it knows about the Hutsuls was written within twenty kilometres of this saddle.

Walking from the pass

The saddle is a trailhead as well as a viewpoint. The standard outing is Mt Kostrycha (about 1,585m) by way of polonyna Vesnarka: a loop of some 14 km with 625m of ascent, six or seven hours unhurried, most of it over grassy ridge tops rather than through forest. It makes an easy first Carpathian hike and people bring children on it.

From the ridge the panorama widens — the full Chornohora wall from Pip Ivan through Hoverla to Petros, the Gorgany to the north, and, if the air is clean, the cut pistes of Bukovel and Drahobrat on opposite sides of the view. Down in the village, small waterfalls on the Kryvets and Rosish streams are worth an hour if you have one.

Getting there, and when to come

Nothing here needs walking to. The pass is roughly 18 km from Vorokhta and 16 from Verkhovyna, and about 120 km by road from Ivano-Frankivsk — 85 as the crow flies, but the road follows the valleys, so allow more time than the navigator offers. The surface is ordinary asphalt with the usual Carpathian potholes. There is no car park, only a wide verge beside the stalls, and the road is busy; park where you are not narrowing it. Buses from Ivano-Frankivsk to Verkhovyna cross the pass every hour or two — ask for the Pereval stop — but getting back means flagging down whatever comes past, and evening services are thin.

Fill the tank in Vorokhta or Verkhovyna; there is no fuel up here. Dress warmer than the valley suggests — the wind comes off both sides of a watershed. Mornings and the hour after rain give the cleanest air, summer afternoons haze the distance over, and October light is why photographers keep coming back. In winter the road ices; chains are not a silly thing to have in the boot.