The Upper Mnich Ponds are a group of nine small glacial ponds tucked away on the Upper Mnich Terrace, a shelf in the Valley Behind Mnich, right below the towering north face of Mnich peak in the High Tatras. This is a spot you won't find marked on any signposted trail, yet it rewards those who find it with a quiet, untouched corner of the High Tatras.

The landscape here is genuinely unusual - smooth, glacier-polished rocky humps and ridges with water-filled hollows nestled between them. Geomorphologists actually compare this terrain to Scandinavian fjelds, making it stand out from typical Tatra valleys. Most of the ponds are seasonal, drying up at times, except for the largest, Pond IX, which holds water year-round thanks to its solid rock bed. In summer, the still waters mirror the jagged Mnich ridge above, while spring meltwater fills the basins to their fullest. The overall mood is wild and raw, exactly what you'd expect from a high-mountain glacial terrace.

How to get there

• There is no marked tourist trail to the Upper Mnich Ponds - only an unmarked climbers' path runs alongside them, used mainly by mountaineers heading up to the Mnich walls
• The ponds can be seen from a distance from the trails leading to Wrota Chałubińskiego and Szpiglasowa Przełęcz

Practical information

• No marked access route - the area is realistically reachable only by climbers heading toward Mnich
• Lachenal's sedge, a plant rarely found elsewhere in the Polish Carpathians, grows along the shores of the ponds

Interestingly, the individual ponds have no separate names of their own - they're simply numbered I through IX, a reminder that they're best understood as one connected geomorphological group rather than nine distinct lakes.