Dinara – highest in Croatia
Peaks visited:
| Peak | Height | PF | Municipality | Location |
| Dinara | 1831m | 733m | Croatia | GPX |
Our 4th day in Croatia was Dinara-day. The overall goal with this whole trip was to visit the country’s highest point. Anne and I established “base-camp” on a hotel in the town Knin and was ready to move out as soon as the weather permitted. It was pouring down in the morning and not a single mountain could be seen.
It turned out to be a long, rainy and grey morning, but the weather forecast promised better weather later in the day. Still, we were prepared for a possible wet and cloudy hike. But as Dinara offers no difficulties other than “getting there”, we could live with the a grey and rainy walk.
At approx. 10am, it stopped raining and we decided that Dinara was a “go” and drove to the Glavas trailhead (approx. 590m). We were the only ones there and I had a feeling that we would have the mountain to ourselves today.
We left the trailhead 11:15am. We followed a well worn (and marked) path upwards and soon arrived at the old fortress. Interesting as this thing was, our primary goal was the mountain and decided to visit the ruins upon descent.
A bit later, we passed a cave (signposted Pećine – probably “cave” in Croatian language) and made another note on things that needed further exploration upon descent. Then it started to pour down again and we took shelter in the forest. The rain only lasted 5 minutes and this was the last rain we had for the rest of the day.
We continued up the mountain Dinara – the 2nd largest (not 2nd highest) mountain in the Dinaric Alps system. Apparently, the summit (1830,91m) is called Sinjal, while the entire mountain massif is called Dinara.
At 1000m elevation, we found a water spring, satisfied our thirst and filled up our bottles. Then we continued up to a fork (approx. 1250m) where we chose to go left. The option for a round trip hike seemed promising. A very nice thing was that the fog gradually lifted as our ascent progressed. We passed a small forest at approx. 1600m before we arrived on the summit ridge.
We reached the summit of Dinara at 2:14pm– after 3 hours of walking. There was no fog on the summit – which was almost too good to be true, considering the morning weather. Anne and I were indeed happy to have reached one more country high point, but the celebration would have to wait until the dinner table in the evening.
We returned along our ascent route for 0,7km, then turned left onto a path that seemed to take us in the direction of Jancija Glavica (1585m) . We quickly lost sight of the path but found it again and followed it until we reached the foothills of Jancija Glavica. Anne choose to walk past it, but of course I had to go up there!
I joined Anne a bit later and we had now lost sight of the path. After some off-trail hiking, we found the path shortly after passing the chapel (?) – Kapelica Sv.Ilije – down in the valley. We followed the path down to the Martinove Kosare stone hut and joined our ascent route a bit further down on the meadow.
On the way down to Glavas, we took the time to take a closer look at the cave (Crvena Pecina) and the fortress. We returned to the trailhead 4:57pm.
Trip statistics: 16,6km total, 1340 vertical meters, 5h:45m
Upon returning to Knin, we stopped by the Krka river and admired this nice waterfall.
Pictures from the trip:
Amazing photos!! Looks like quite an adventure!
Lovely site! I visited Norway briefly a couple of years ago and have been keen to get back there ever since. Your posts will help fill the void 😊