The whole of the High Tatras fits into twenty-six kilometres of granite on the Slovak–Polish border, which makes it the smallest alpine range on Earth. All of it is what the ice age left behind. Glaciers sharpened twenty-five summits past 2,500 metres and gouged more than a hundred hollows below them, now lakes the locals call pleso. They are startlingly clear. The ice that cut their basins has been gone a long time, so nothing clouds them with rock flour, and walking the level loop around Štrbské Pleso you count stones on the bottom several metres out. Before sunrise the water lies dead still, the peaks take the first copper light across it, and the promenade that fills by late morning is empty. The range rises straight off the plain with no foothills, so from the towns at its foot the whole wall stands.
The rest of it is a climb into what the ice left higher up. A cable car from Tatranská Lomnica lifts you to the summit of Lomnický štít at 2,634 metres. You step out beside its old observatory onto a full circle of bare peaks with the valleys far below, the whole range, no rope anywhere in it. On foot the way in is the forest-and-boulder trail out of Štrbské Pleso, half a day up to Popradské pleso under the walls of the main ridge, with a mountain hut at the end. Above the spruce line the slope goes over to kosodrevina, a knee-high dwarf pine dense enough to turn the path into a trench, and on a warm afternoon you climb through the smell of resin. That belt is where the last of the leftovers lives. When the glaciers pulled back, the chamois up here did not go down with them. It stayed with the cold and slowly became its own creature, on this ridge and no other, working the ledges above the dwarf pine while marmots whistle from the boulder fields underneath. Everything else in these mountains came up after the ice. That one stayed.