Białka Gorge
Nature
On the west end of the Spiskie Pieniny, near Krempachy village, you can admire the expansive but short gorge of the Białka river, the right tributary of the Dunajec. The beauty of this place is well known not only to naturalists and tourists but also film makers: the local landscape ‘was cast’ in, among other films, Janosik (the Polish version of Robin Hood) in 1974. The area was also well known to the Neanderthal people whose oldest traces can be found in the Pieniny. In the Obłazowa Cave, thirty thousands years ago, primitive man even left his weapon: a 70-centimetre-long boomerang made from a mammoth’s tusk. It is the world’s oldest boomerang, with a throwing range of up to 65 metres (displayed in the PAN Museum in Kraków). The reserve was established in 1959 protecting, apart from the landscape, the relict vegetation covering the rocks. The gorge is guarded by two rocks – Kramnica on the right side and Obłazowa on the left. The walls of the latter are rich in prominent fossils, mainly of Jurassic ammonites. From the vantage point of both rocks, awe-inspiring scenery stretches across the Nowatorska Valley, the Spisz area, as well as the Gorce, Pieniny and Tatra Mountains.
The nature reserve established on the border of the Spiš Pieniny Mountains and Orawsko-Nowotarska Valley. It has been formed by the Białka river which ran through the single massif and created two rocks: Kramnica and Obłazowa which are at a distance of about 100 m from each other. In the riverbed, there are numerous granite pebbles brought from the Tatra Mountains, and in the rocks – 3 small caves. Here, the oldest traces of human life in the Pieniny Mountains have been found, so has the oldest boomerang in the world made of a mammoth tusk.
