The real summit beyond Koráb’s lookout tower
Visitors drive to Koráb’s lookout tower and busy western top. My P100 objective lay farther east, reached by a 4 km ridge walk linking the mountain’s public summit with its quieter natural counterpart.
Koráb’s lookout tower dominates the developed western summit. It was not the summit I had come for. The road, hut and steel tower occupy the developed western bump, while my Czech P100 objective lay farther east along the same ridge. That split between the public summit and the quieter high point gave an otherwise easy 4 km walk its character.
Beyond the tower road
This was the first summit of my eight-peak day after the drive down from Prague. I parked at a roadside pullout high on the access road above Kdyně, already well up the mountain. From there the walking was easy: paved road, good forest tracks and a short dirt path on the ridge. Cars were coming and going, and other people were out walking, so Koráb immediately felt more like a local excursion hill than an isolated forest summit.
Logging openings broke up the woods and gave broad views over the rolling country around Kdyně. They also made the ridge easier to read. Koráb is not one neat cone with one unmistakable top; the upper ground stretches through several rises between the developed lookout area and the eastern summit point.
I left the paved line and went first to the eastern bump. That was the point I had come to visit, and the final approach became noticeably quieter once I left the road behind. The eastern point was understated: partly cleared ground, grass and trees, with none of the architecture that gives the western bump its visual importance. The contrast was useful. Koráb’s public summit has the tower; the peakbagging objective has almost nothing announcing it.
Eight Czech P100s around Plzeň in one day
Back to the public summit
After visiting the eastern point, I retraced my steps west along the ridge. My GPX recorded its highest reading, 779.9 m, near the tower side, away from the mapped eastern summit. I treated that as a GPS reading, not evidence that the mountain needed to be redefined.
The western bump feels like a different mountain. The paved road reaches the hut and lookout directly, and the steady flow of visitors makes sense once the tower appears through the trees. Koráb also has a longer lookout tradition than the modern steel structure suggests: Kdyně’s first wooden tower and small hut opened here on 7 August 1938, while the present tower was completed in 1992.
I did not climb the tower on this visit. I checked the ground around the tower, found the bent red-and-white survey pole and stopped at the history board beside the hut.
The walk back to the car was quick. Most visitors had an obvious reason to stop at the lookout tower; my reason for being on Koráb had waited farther east, on a quiet patch of grass and trees with almost nothing announcing the summit.