Doamnei Valley to Balea – day hiking tour

• Balea Waterfalls
• Transfagarasan Road
• Doamnei Valley&Lake
• Balea Lake
• Carpathians mountain ridge

We’ll drive on the “road to the sky”, the famous cross-Carpathian Transfagarasan road and at the cabin from Balea Waterfalls we’ll start the hike. We’re going to see the Balea Waterfalls and we’ll continue climbing just to cross the top into the parallel valley – Valea Doamnei: a quiet, wild unspoiled nature.

Our hike will be more than a third of the time through coniferous forest on a narrow marked path. We’ll be accompanied by the calls of several types of Tits, Chaffinches and Woodpeckers until we reach the alpine meadows. From there on, Alpine accentors and Water pipits will take the relay and in the background we’ll hear the calls of Marmots, and even get to see some if we’re lucky. Not seldom did it happen to run into herds of chamois, grazing on the meadows and drinking water from the river.

Once we’ll reach the cirque, formed by glacial erosion where the relic Doamnei Lake awaits us, we’ll continue on a steeper climb to reach a saddle that offers us a spectacular view of both the valley we hiked and the Balea valley with the lake and the cabins around it and the twisted Transfagarasan road. From there we’ll descend to the Balea Lake, or target destination for this hike.

On our way back, we could either drive on the Transfagarasan or take the gondola and have a view over the road from above.