Pilsko is one of those peaks of the Żywiec Beskids that are hard to speak of as a single mountain. The name covers the whole massif: the summit dome, the ranges of mountain meadows, the forests of the reserve and the slopes on which skiing has gone on for years. The Polish slopes lie within Korbielów, a village in the municipality of Jeleśnia, while the highest point itself is already on the other side of the border.

The border ridge and the watershed

The main summit of Pilsko is 1,557 m above sea level and lies entirely on the Slovak side. It is the second highest peak of the Żywiec-Orava Beskids after Babia Góra. Along the ridge of the massif run the Polish-Slovak border and the Main European Watershed, which separates the Baltic Sea catchment from the Black Sea catchment.

On the Polish side the highest point is Góra Pięciu Kopców, about 400 m north of the actual summit. Some sources give 1,543 m for Pilsko, and the description of the mountain hut on Hala Miziowa 1,542 m. The discrepancy is small, but you may see it on different maps. On the slope of Góra Pięciu Kopców, beside the yellow trail, stands a cross commemorating a soldier killed at that spot on 1 September 1939.

The name Pilsko has several explanations and none is certain. It may come from the former mountain meadow Pielsko, named after its owner, Piel. It may also mean a place of sawing timber. Folk tradition links it with the drinking of the Orava brigands, and this version was given by the Żywiec bailiff Komoniecki in his Dziejopis. There are also those who hold that it is a distorted form of the Slovak name Poľsko. In print the name appeared in 1721 in a work by Fr Gabriel Rzączyński, who was also the first recorded climber of the summit.

The reserve and the plants of the mountain meadows

On the Polish side the summit parts of the massif are protected by the Pilsko nature reserve, established in 1971 and today covering 105.21 ha. The Slovak reserve from 1967 is much larger and covers 809 ha. The whole lies within the Żywiec Landscape Park, in which the Pilsko massif is one of three mountain groups, alongside Worek Raczański and the range of Lipowska and Romanka.

The most interesting plants grow on the meadows below the summit dome. On Hala Cebulowa there is a community of bog asphodel, Siberian garlic and alpine globeflower, regarded as unknown elsewhere in Poland. The name of the meadow itself comes from the garlic, which locals used to call onion (cebula). The neighbouring Hala Miziowa has a curiosity of a different kind: a large raised bog, formed in a hollow left by a landslide, about 100 m long and more than 3 m thick. By the springs a wet meadow forms in which Siberian garlic and bog asphodel grow in great numbers, and it is regarded as the only such site in the Polish Carpathians. For this reason it is better not to leave the marked trails.

A quieter, less visited spot is Hala Malorka in Korbielów, a former pastoral meadow above Hala Uszczawne. From the clearing you can see the summit dome of Pilsko, Hala Miziowa, the Romanka range and Babia Góra. There is a stop of the nature trail there with a board on the vegetation.

The mountain hut on Hala Miziowa

The ascent of Pilsko almost always leads through the mountain hut on Hala Miziowa, situated at the foot of the summit dome at an altitude of about 1,270 m. The name of the meadow comes from the surname Mizia, one of thirty Korbielów landowners in 1930. In the same year a hut of the Polish Tatra Society was opened. It burned down in 1953, and after the fire a temporary hut operated in farm buildings. The present masonry building was opened in October 2003. The Main Beskid Trail runs across the meadow, and from here it is easy to reach Góra Pięciu Kopców.

The summit dome is broad and flat, so in poor visibility it is easy to lose one's bearings on it. The entry on Pilsko recalls that in the winter of 1980 a group of pupils from a sports class with their coach got lost here in fog, and three of them died of exhaustion. The lesson for today's walkers is practical: in fog keep to the trail and its markings, and turn back if the weather worsens.

The skiing side of Korbielów

On the northern slopes of the massif operates the Pilsko Ski Resort in Korbielów. It has 9 drag lifts, one chairlift from Korbielów-Kamienna to Hala Szczawiny and almost 20 km of runs, and it is regarded as the highest-lying resort in Poland apart from Kasprowy Wierch. Right next to it, by the lower station, operates the small Kolej Baba resort with one chairlift and an easy run.

The lifts and runs were built at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, cutting down 10.5 ha of forest and 0.25 ha of dwarf mountain pine. In the 1990s several nature organisations protested against this development, among them the Workshop for All Beings (Pracownia na rzecz Wszystkich Istot), the Nature Protection League and the Polish Ecological Club. The Supreme Administrative Court ordered lifts number 8 and 9 to be dismantled by the end of 2005, and a scientific expert report restricted the use of the runs: it banned skiing over the dwarf pine and in the strict reserve on the Slovak side, and made use of the runs dependent on the thickness of the snow cover. The dispute between skiing and nature protection is therefore part of the history of this massif.

Other ski resorts of the Beskids and the mountain huts of the Żywiec Beskids are described in separate articles.

Around Pilsko

Not far from Pilsko stretches the ridge of Lipowska and Rysianka. The summit of Rysianka is 1,322 m above sea level, and on its slopes lies the Lipowska nature reserve, which protects upland raised bogs and upper montane spruce forest. The reserve was established in 2008 and covers 62.6 ha. The bogs here are vulnerable to being churned up by quad bikes and motocross bikes, so visitors should keep to the trails.

For a rainy day in Korbielów there is also a place of a completely different kind: the Motor Museum (Muzeum Motóra) by the Dominican monastery, run by volunteers, in which stand motorcycles and household appliances from the Polish People's Republic era.