It’s mid-September, and only 7 a.m., but breakfast is already in full swing, not an empty seat left at the tables squeezed into the cozy timber-framed room. The Kurmekaj brothers, our hosts, are frantically grabbing four plates apiece from the kitchen, loaded with fried eggs, sausage, fresh sheep cheese, and cucumber-and-tomato salad, a fixture on the Balkan plate. I do my best to duck out of their way as the door behind me swings open and more trekkers pile in.

This is my fourth day of ten on the Peaks of the Balkans trek, a 119-mile inn-to-inn circular trail across the long-disputed borderlands of Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro, through what’s called the Accursed Mountains—a name whose ominous origins supposedly lie either with the devil, war, or travelers cursing the range’s unforgiving terrain, depending on who you ask. Conceived in the early 2010s as a cross-border peace and tourism project, this trail was meant to reconnect mountain communities that had been splintered by war, create livelihoods, and give residents a reason to remain—or return—to villages hollowed out by conflict and emigration.

By those measures, it has been remarkably successful. A late 2025 study published in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism estimated that roughly 43,000 hikers now walk the trail each year—up from regional estimates of roughly 20,000 in the pre-pandemic era—injecting more than €25 million ($27.7 million USD) annually into mountain regions where family homes, shepherd settlements, and seasonal villages have increasingly become guesthouses for trekkers. But that success is also beginning to crowd some of the places that the trail was created to support, as a growing number of travelers takes interest.

Ricardo Fahrig of the Albania-based adventure travel company Zbulo, which has been running Peaks trips since the trail’s early years, helped me piece together my own self-guided route on these trails. He says the contrast between busy Dobërdol and the quieter terrain I’m soon to enter after breakfast gets to the heart of the issue. “It’s not the number of travelers on the Peaks of the Balkans trail,” he tells me, “but rather the distribution. Some sections remain sparsely visited, while others, like Dobërdol, struggle with volume during a relatively short season”, a period from roughly June through September, with some hikers continuing into early October.