Mt Stih (Svydovets)

No other summit in the Ukrainian Carpathians has a chairlift running to within a few minutes of the top. Stih is about 1,704 m, and Drahobrat — the country’s highest ski resort — is built on its eastern flank, so a double chair does the climbing and you finish over open grass. Locals say Stuh rather than Stih. It is the same hill.

In summer the pistes go back to being pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep graze the polonyna right over the top, and the lift pylons stand among them looking provisional. High ground for almost no effort is why Stih collects walkers who would never get up Blyznytsia — and why people doing the full ridge treat it as a waypoint rather than a destination.

A mountain with two different sides

Stih is about 1,704 m; some surveys give 1,707 m. What defines it is the asymmetry: the north-western slopes are steep and awkward to get onto, while the eastern and western sides fall away in long even grades. Those easy flanks are the whole reason a resort ended up here rather than somewhere with a better road.

The summit and everything just under it is grass, not forest: open polonyna, no trees, nothing to break the wind. The arc of ridges around Drahobrat holds snow from November into mid-May, which is what gives the resort its season and leaves patches in the hollows for late-spring walkers to blunder into.

The other Mt Stih, and why it matters

Two mountains in the Ukrainian Carpathians are called Stih, and only one is open. This one sits in north-eastern Svydovets, roughly 35 km north of the Romanian frontier and well outside the border zone: no permit, no registration, nothing to arrange.

The other Stih is in the Marmarosh massif some 40 km south-east, 1,653 m, with the Ukraine–Romania border running across its summit and boundary marker 413 standing on top; until the Second World War the frontiers of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland met at that point. It is also closed. A Zakarpattia regional defence council decision of 27 May 2022 shut the Stih – Mezhypotoky – Pip Ivan line for the duration of martial law, along with the Dilove approach to Pip Ivan and several routes in Uzhanskyi National Park. Since 1 April 2026, being inside the 5 km border strip without written permission from the State Border Guard Service is an administrative offence, with fines from 850 to 1,700 hryvnias. If a route description sends you up Stih from Luhy or Dilove, it is describing the shut one.

Lakes, a waterfall and the neighbours

Stih sits in the busiest corner of the massif. Vorozheska lies below at about 1,460 m: two linked basins filled by a melting snow patch that is itself getting smaller, and the lakes are going with it. Dohiaska, also called Hereshaska, is larger and almost rectangular at about 1,577 m, with water that stays icy through August. Ivor, small and clear, sits at about 1,600 m nearer the resort. Between Stih and Dohiaska the Kosivska drops the Drahobrat waterfall, roughly seven metres in steps.

For the summits: Blyznytsia stands south across a saddle at 1,883 m, the top of Svydovets and the last place on the massif with edelweiss on its cliffs. Velykyi Kotel rises north-west at about 1,770 m, and the Zhandarm outcrops sit east along the ridge. All of them hang off the same web of paths that crosses Stih, so one trip can take in two or three.

Routes across it

The chairlift is the shortest answer, and in normal summers it runs outside the ski season — worth checking before you build a day around it. On foot, the standard outing is the circuit from Drahobrat over Blyznytsia and Stih and back: about 10.6 km, comfortable in a day for anyone used to hills.

The long line over it is Vershynamy Svydovtsia, Along the Peaks of Svydovets: several days between Yasinia and Ust-Chorna, walked either way, picking up nearly every top and tarn on the massif. Bigger traverses begin at Kvasy and cross Blyznytsia, Stih and Velykyi Kotel before dropping to Chorna Tysa. From late autumn to spring the crest is under snow and wants the gear to match.

Getting up here

Yasinia is the start, on the railway from Lviv and Kyiv down to Rakhiv, with buses in from Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod. Drivers take the Nadvirna–Yaremche road.

The last 9 km up to Drahobrat is the part nobody warns you about properly: steep, rutted, four-wheel drive only. Local drivers run transfers, and it is not worth arguing the point with a hire car. Carry a warm layer and a shell even in August — the summit spends much of its time in cloud with wind across it, and there is nowhere on the polonyna to get out of either.