A well-known snow pit is at the beginning of the climb to Subrina’s Amphitheater, next to which the mountain marking is carried to the top. Access to this pit, which has been a tourist attraction in recent years, has recently been cleaned by Željko Starčević - the Chief of Marking and Guidance Service at PK Subra, and one of the people who knows Orjen best.
He says that in the pit, even though we do not notice it immediately, we will feel a sharp flow of ice-air that is "leaking" from it, and descending further down.
"In order to reduce the pain, the inhabitants of the forests have constructed approaches to these rare places with water for hundreds of year. Each meter of the path closer to the drops or snow water was important because most of the water was used as drinking water for the cattle. It was a tough job, because the water from the snow had to be 'pulled out', sometimes from great depths, and then melt it in something, which is neither an easy or fast job," says Starcevic.
PHOTO: Slavica Kosić
Orjen is a place with the highest precipitation in Europe, averaging just over five meters a year. If that amount of water was found in a different place, it would cause terrible flooding and general devastation, and you would not even see a stream on Orjen.
Orjen is like a sieve: the water gets poured heavily, as much as it can, and it will just disappear in the deep karst after a meter or two. It will drink each and every last drop, just as if it was its first. These great rainwaters will again see the sunlight only after two, or three days or more, though it is not on Orjen, but all the way down below, in Boka, on the seashore.
In the rainy season, the influx of these waters is so great that the Bay with its greenish color of the sea and low saltiness, looks more like a far-reaching Norwegian fjord than the Mediterranean, explains Starčević. He points out that Orjen is not completely anhydrous. People have passed down the knowledge of how to live and survive in the mountain without water. Everyone, even the smallest source, is carefully concaved, cleansed, fenced and guarded.
Text by Slavica Kosic, on July 16th 2018, read more at Vijesti
