Sustainable Travel Pitch: High Scardus Trail/Western Balkans

Rugged, frontier trekking between Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia

The High Scardus Trail is one of Europe’s newest transnational long-distance hiking trails, which includes 22 stages between Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia. I had the opportunity in 2021 to photograph a scouting expedition of this project/partnership between the GIZ, Trail Angels (an Austrian sustainable tourism consultant) and various local tourism agencies and stakeholders. The trail offers rugged trekking in an untouched and unspoiled mountain corridor in Europe, while also presenting sustainable development opportunities for, and collaboration between, the people of these small countries that have too often been the victims of crises in recent history.

I visited the trail for a section hike (my third visit overall) in August 2025 with an American environmental economist who was volunteering for the Peace Corps on a project in Kosovo’s Sharri Mountain National Park. The journey we took revealed to us that the trail has, at best, not aged well and is suffering from systemic problems that we believe are a result of the overall project’s failure. A number of our findings:

We found that in Kosovo, the DMO that manages the Kosovo portion of the Trail website is run by an individual who owns a travel company that lists services on the Trail website, but at the same time forbids any potential local competitors from registering their services on the official Trail website.

The Trail hasn’t had enough regular visitors to keep the trail sustained and clearly marked. We often found ourselves getting lost due to overgrowth, which we posit is due to limited competition with the company that the DMO favors. A Belgian hiker went missing on the trail in 2024 and was never found (see below).

In 2021, Anica Palazzo, the project lead from GIZ North Macedonia told me that the High Scardus Trail was intended to be “a framework from which business can happen.” Clearly, this hasn’t materialized if one company can monopolize booking. We found that an official guesthouse operator was planning to close his doors altogether, due to there not being enough regular bookings to bother with the business model.

My travel companion and I came away with a sense of frustration for the ineffectiveness of international development projects. Pouring untold thousands of euros into something, dressing it up, then washing their hands of it as locals are left with a broken scaffolding of a solution. The trail is truly stunning, but we felt that the impetus for the project came from a desire from international stakeholders to “force” a cross-border collaborative project in the region for the optics of such a “win,” but didn’t effectively complete the project in a way that advances their intended goal of “sustainable tourism.”

Why the story is relevant now:

British travel writer Rudolf Abraham has a forthcoming guidebook on High Scardus Trail (He was only a day ahead of me when I walked the trail for the second time in summer 2023).

A Belgian hiker on the High Scardus disappeared on the trail in September 2024 and was never found.

High Scardus Trail won an award for the "Best European Project" at the British Guild of Travel Writers in 2022.

Thank you for your time and consideration.