Welcome
On this website you will find walks to many beautiful places in nature that can be found in the north-western part of Slovenia.
It mainly covers the Slovenian part of the Julian Alps, so actually Triglav National Park and surroundings.
The walks vary from short tours of less than an hour to almost full-day hikes.
On every area page you find the locations listed from North to South. For every location there is a link to a detail page with more information supplemented with GPS waypoints and tracks on how to get there and do the walk.
Walking in Northwest Slovenia
The Julian Alps are different from other mountain regions. It is more compact, the slopes are steeper and the valleys are deeper, the scenery is very diverse. There are mountain rivers and waterfalls everywhere to be found. You will be surprised by the amount of beautiful natural sights and stunning views, all so close together. This website might help the foreigner to find them.
Slovenes love their nature and you can see that. There are hiking paths everywhere, most of them well marked with the common red-white dots or red stripes and also secured were needed. Often they are maintained by local people, probably also local members of the Alpine Association of Slovenia. For example, it is not exceptional to see a farmer keeping a strip of grass short to distinguish a path that runs along his meadow.
The Alpine Association of Slovenia (Planinska zveza Slovenije) with all its subdivisions is one of the largest associations in Slovenia. Among other things they take care of maintaining and waymarking a highly detailed network of trails.
The areas chosen to organize this site
To make things easier to group I used three areas and called them Bovec, Bohinj and Other. This is because from Bovec you can drive to Tolmin (south) or Kranjska Gora (north) in an hour or less, but between Bovec and the Bohinj area lie mountains without roads which means it takes at least two hours to drive around them.
The Soča river belongs to the Bovec area but this splendid emerald jewel deserved a separate page.
The page Other is used for a few locations that cannot be linked directly to the two regions mentioned, but you can reach them from both sides.
Another reason for the chosen regions is that we always stay in or close to Bovec to cover that area and decided to stay close to the Bohinj lake to cover the eastern part of the Julian Alps. So the arrangement of this site more or less reflects our personal opinion. Choose your home base as you wish.
As you will see, the vast majority of locations described are in the Bovec area. This is because Bovec is the centre of outdoor activities and a good starting point for a lot of hiking enjoyment.
Trip information
For every walk to a location you will find important trip information on both the area overview pages and the detail pages to make it easier for you to decide if you have the time and energy to do the walk.
The following rules are applied:
Duration:
Estimated time from the starting point to the destination and back without stops.
Note: GPS tracks in gpx format that can be downloaded include our breaks, therefore their total time is usually longer.
Length:
The whole walk from the starting point to the destination and back to the starting point.
Height difference:
The total height gain during the walk, so after going down and back up, the additional meters going up are added.
To give an impression of the figures: average fit people like us can gain 100 meters of height in 15 minutes on an average path, but not for hours. After a while the breaks usually get a bit more frequent. An average walking speed in mountainous areas is usually not much more than 3 kilometers an hour. Also remember that you want to calculate stops with all that beauty to look at. You probably won’t struggle for hours to get on a mountain top and then walk back down after less than five minutes.
This website does not replace a hiking book since walks are not fully described in detail from beginning to end. On the other hand, most walks are well way marked, so as soon as you find the starting point which is always possible with the information on this site, it won’t be difficult to find the whole trail.
There are a few good books available and you might want to buy one since they do describe walks in much more detail.
Accuracy of the trip information
All the trip information is calculated from my GPS device, a Garmin GPSMAP62, smartphones are less accurate.
The tracks are cleaned, our breaks during the walk are abstracted and track outliers that mainly arise in gorges are deleted. The result is a clean track with sufficient accuracy to mention time, distance and height difference for a walk.
I don’t think that you will ever be unpleasantly surprised with walks that point out to be much higher or longer than mentioned on this site.
After all, that’s where this site is about, giving you as much accurate information as possible!
GPS data
Not all the During the walk sections on every Details page contain an even amount of information. Sometimes it depends on what I could remember back home if I didn’t have taken notes during walking.
If you have the possibility to use the GPS data downloads on every Details page you will always be able to find the location and do the walk.
The waypoint files to download for every location always contain the starting point (parking) of the walk and sometimes additional points of interest. Except for three locations there also is a track file for every location that contains the whole walk. In addition, you can download a Google Earth .kml file of all the starting points on the Map page if you wish.
I offer all the files in Google Earth .kml format and in .gpx format. The .kml files can be opened directly in Google Earth. These track files only contain line strings (the path), no date/time or elevation data. The .gpx files can be used in your GPS device or smartphone app. Most of the .gpx track files do contain date/time and elevation data.
The .gpx tracks include our breaks along the way, so the total time in the .gpx files is usually longer than mentioned in the Trip information. Depending on accuracy of the GPS signal, especially along steep slopes, the track line may be less accurate, but usually there is only one path to walk in those situations.
GPS smartphone apps
If you don’t have experience with GPS apps on a smartphone, I can recommend the following two apps, I have used them both and think that they are rather good. Both apps cost 5 euros and they can import tracks and waypoint files. Both apps also let you record your own routes while walking, nice if you get lost and want to walk back to where you came from.
Android: GPX Viewer Pro from Vectura games
iOS: MapOut from Valnova
Note: GPX Viewer Pro also has an iOS version but it is much less extensive than the Android version because the author just started developing it, so for Apple devices use MapOut instead.
Take care
I don’t think that I have to put a disclaimer on this site and that it is clear that you always walk at your own risk. If we noticed one or more sections of a walk that need to be mentioned as being problematic, you will see a note on the regarding details page in orange.
Serious weather conditions in the past can have changed the landscape and make walking impossible or even worse: seemingly doable but dangerous.
GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation) notes
The only cookies that this website uses are from Google Analytics.
The data is not used for any commercial purpose. You will never receive commercial advertisements or whatsoever because you visited www.slovenialocations.com.
The use of this data is to be able to view website visits in Google Analytics so that I know how many people visit my website, how many and which pages they view, and where they come from.
The only personal information gathered is your IP address, but the last part is filtered out before the data enters the database, so you cannot be tracked as a person. The most personal information that is stored is the region the visit comes from, so your visit can be seen as anonymous.
Nothing but footprints
Slovenia is a clean country and everything looks tidy. Construction projects are finished till they integrate into the natural surroundings. Nature is clean, you hardly find any waste. That must be because everybody walking in nature in Slovenia leaves nothing behind but footprints. Please help to keep it that way!
The banner on top of this page is taken from Slemenova špica. From left to right: Mala Mojstrovka, Velika Mojstrovka, Travnik, Jalovec behind clouds, Kotova špica, and others. A panorama of six pictures.