Photography Blog of Watcher Romano

As I already mentioned in the Bears Cave post the Apuseni mountains are home to some of the most beautiful carstic formations in Romania. Today it’s the turn of the Scarisoara Glacier Cave to be the centerfold of my blog

As the name tells us, the cave hosts a glacier, which used to be a very large one (I’ll give you a link for reference later on) – the largest in Romania, no less! However, due to global warming or bad conservation practices or who knows why, the new name should now be the Scarisoara Ice Pool Cave:

Scarisoara - Inside

I assume all that water comes from the melt down glacier, because what is left is just a little snow:

Remainings of the Glacier - SAD actually!

A note on this photo: It is one of the few occasions when I really felt I needed to use RAW, and I am pretty sure that I could not have done it without RAW. The original light was completely horrible (very very intense yellow).

Coming back to the subject of this post: the cave. The entry point is located at 1165m altitude, but there is where the DESCENT begins, and it is 48 meters deep:

Descent to Scarisoara

As you can easily see, it’s quite a steep one, but there are stairs so it’s not a big deal, right? Even on a warm and dry summer day , as you go 48 meters deep in the bowels of the rocky mountain, near a glacier, it’s getting cold and wet and slippery:

Last meters before the cave

There is a funny part when you return to the surface from the cold cave to the warm air outside, and do so quite fast (it’s just some long steep metal stairs ):

Steamy lens

I am sure glass wearers were expecting it, but I found it surprisingly annoying.

If you want to get there I suggest you do it fast, if you want to catch any ‘glacier’ left . If so, you should know a classic fun fact Romania style: the Scarisoara glacier is NOT accessible from the Scarisoara Village, but from the Garda de Sus village!

Ariesul Mare Map

Both these villages are located on the DN75 road from Alba, which is the red horizontal one on the map. The orange ‘roads’ on this map are not ‘roads’ per se:

Access road to Scarisoara

You can do this road with any ‘regular’ car but you need to know how to drive and to feel your car (where your wheels are, what you clearance is in real life terms, etc ) . The signs for the pedestrian path through the forest indicated 4 and a half hours from the top down, so I’d advise going by car.

One more thing worth mentioning is the fact that accommodation in the area is incredibly pricey, especially compared to what they actually offer. On a side note here, I was lodged in an attic like room – with inclined walls. This combined very bad with the fact that I am not a deep sleeper but one that turns around quite a lot, so after the first night I had accumulated 4 bumps on the head .

Once you’re there there are some nice views around too (the wooden church where I shot the Electric Fence), meadows (with cows or maybe haystacks), and some very storylike images that will make the subject of a future blog post. (no, I do not have the ability to see in the future, I edited this post when I published the other one )

Unfortunately Wikipedia only has some short pages (EN and RO), so I must refer you to another site with a lot of info (RO) . This site also has some pictures of the glacier when it actually was a glacier.

Let me close by reminding you about the modern, technology enabled ways to be automatically informed when the blog has something new to show (and it’s quite often) : the RSS feed or the possibility to get email updates.

I read that it is a good idea to also have pictures of yourself on your blog to give it some ‘life’, so here goes:

Watcher after Scarisoara