Ever since days as a Boy Scout I've collected topographic maps. Each new place has meant getting oriented to the lay of the land. These days satisfying that topographic itch is less about paper maps and more about digital data. I rely on elevation data downloaded several years ago from the GLOBE project.*
As I've gotten into genealogy it's also been interesting to examine the lay of the land for places where my ancestors migrated from. The places they left in Europe are mostly flat, agricultural lands. I already knew that was the case for the immediate vicinity of the hometowns of my Hungarian grandparents. Nevertheless on good days from their small towns my grandparents would have been seeing the Carpathian Mountains on the northeast horizon.
Checking online for information about the Carpathians, I found this site, which includes a large scale topographic map presenting the Carpathians extending in an arc from northwestern Slovakia to southern Romania. I also found this site, with a topographic map restricted to the Ukrainian Carpathians. On both of those maps the contour and/or shading interval does not do justice to small features. (Additionally an annoying aspect of the Ukrainian Carpathians site is that names on the map are in Russian instead of Ukrainian.) The alternative map below similarly covers the Ukrainian Carpathians, also extending into parts of bordering countries.
Those bordering countries are: Hungary in the southwest corner; Romania east of Hungary and south of Ukraine; in the northwest corner Poland; and Slovakia between Poland and Hungary. The western letter C marks the location of my grandmother's hometown, Chop (Hungarian Csap), on the Ukraine-Hungary border. My grandfather's hometown is a short distance to the northwest, on the Slovakia-Ukraine border. I've also marked in that western part of Ukraine's Transcarpathia the locations of the cities Uzhhorod and Mukachevo.
In later multiple posts I'll return to western Transcarpathia. But in this post I'll focus on a portion of the group tour conducted by Cobblestone Freeway. Stops included Chernivtsi (the letter C on the eastern edge of the map above), the village of Tulova (T), Kosiv (K) and the mountain areas near it, and Lviv (L, on the northern edge of the map above). I-F is Ivano-Frankivsk, capital of its province. Below is a view zoomed in on the mountains near Kosiv.
Besides being the site of Ukraine's highest point, additional top-10 peaks are located in the Chornohora Range, which as the maps show forms part of the border between the provinces of Ivano-Frankivsk and Transcarpathia. The highest peaks slightly exceed 2000 m. But the GLOBE data are averaged over approximately 1 km2, so the highest pixels (the darkest reds) displayed here are just over 1900 m. It's my understanding that the traditional Hutsul region extends west to that range, and wraps around it into extreme eastern Transcarpathia. But the tourist attractions, and the attention of the Cobblestone tour, are in the area closer to Kosiv, where the mountain ridges rise to just a bit above 1000 m (comparable to the Allegheny Mountains of central Pennsylvania). On the map above the letter S marks the location of the tour hotel. Each day's excursion began by heading northeast, descending along the valley until clearing the last big ridge. Then a left turn to the northwest, on a relatively straight and level road to Kosiv. Later excursions continued upstream from Kosiv to the pass at Bukovets (letter B), and from there down into the valley of the "Black" branch of the Cheremosh River, ultimately crossing that branch and then a short distance back uphill to the Museum of Hutsul Magic (HM on the map). It was only after returned from the trip and then independently researching the river that I appreciated that that branch, and other branches not visited, all drain into the valley overlooked by the tour hotel (S). Below is a view from the tour hotel looking northeast down the valley. The view is lit by the mid-October sun close to setting. The ridge on the left is the one needing to be cleared before making a left turn to Kosiv.
* For a discussion about the free software used to create the maps shown here, see this recent post in my other blog. Here's a python detail for reading a tile,
which is GLOBE's terminology for one of its data files:
import numpy as np
fptopo = np.memmap('g10g', dtype='int16', mode='r', shape=(6000,10800))
