Velika Rudoka, Serbia Highpoint

Velika Rudoka

Serbia Highpoint

2660.34m +/- 0.07m (EGM2008 Geoid)

Location 41.91848, 20.776532

July 27, 2025
Eric Gilbertson

In 2014 it was widely believed Djeravica was the highest peak in Serbia. I was on a bicycle tour through eastern Europe and climbed Djeravica in late October. However, it was later revealed that there had been a recent resurvey of the Serbia-Macedonia border, and another peak, Velika Rudoka, was now on the Serbian border. Velika Rudoka was very likely taller than Djeravica, and if true, it would be the true country highpoint of Serbia.

Note: these two peaks are within Kosovo, an autonomous region of Serbia that is seeking independence. The UN does not recognize this independence, though, so by the UN definition both peaks are within the state of Serbia.

In August 2018 Matthew brought a DGPS unit up both peaks and measured Djeravica is 2656.7m +/-0.8m and Velika is 2660.4m +/-1.0m (EGM2008 geoid, 95% confidence intervals). Thus, Velika Rudoka is the true country highpoint of Serbia and is 3.7m +/- 1.8m taller than Djeravica. This meant I had to go back, so I put Velika Rudoka on what I call my cleanup tour (for countries I need to revisit, like ones I climbed the highest legal point but not the highest ground).

This peak was pretty low priority for me since it is pretty easy and accessible, and I’m currently trying to focus on more difficult country highpoints.

In mid July I was in the country of Georgia waiting for a weather window to climb Shkhara, one of the most difficult country highpoints in the world. However, after a week of bad weather with no end in sight, my partner and I decided to pull the plug.

I had an extra 10 days then to fill before the next leg of my travels, and the closest country highpoints I needed were Ararat and Velika Rudoka. Those could conveniently fit in my window. So I flew to Turkey, climbed Ararat, then moved on to Velika Rudoka.

There are two main routes to climb Velika Rudoka. The first is from the Arxhena ski resort near Brod, Kosovo. The second is from the Macedonia side. Flights were cheaper to Macedonia, so I decided to take that route. I already had a Trimble DA2 dgps device with me, so figured I’d take it up to corroborate Matthew’s results.

On July 27 I landed in the Skopje airport and rented the cheapest automatic car I could find, from ABC rental. Unfortunately I hadn’t driven a manual in many years so wasn’t comfortable renting one, though they are significantly cheaper. I ended up getting a small SUV since it was the same price as a regular car, but had slightly better ground clearance. I’d heard this might be important for the roads near the trailhead.

There was some confusion and the previous driver had left the car at his hotel in downtown, so we had to drive there. He had left it half full, which was annoying since I would have to try to return it at exactly that amount.

I started driving around 10am, and went west and south through Tetovo. I stopped at a gas station to get some food, but critically decided not to fill up the tank. The projected range was 200km, and my trailhead was only 50km away. I was being a cheapskate and figured the best chance of getting the tank exactly back to half full was carefully adding fuel on my way back to the airport. If it had been a full-to-full rental as advertised I would have topped it off.

I followed the route from Travis Greiman and Joel Wilner. I drove up a good paved road to about 2km before the village of Gjurgjevista, then turned right on a gravel road. This was no problem for my 2wd mini SUV. Travis made it up in a regular car in 2019 and that should still work if you are careful in a few places.

Interestingly, as I went higher the projected range started dropping very quickly. At 1320m I turned left to traverse the remaining 3km to where Travis started. There the projected range dropped from 100km to “- – km” in about 5 minutes. The low fuel sensor started blinking. So I parked the car right there.

I think there were a few possible explanations for that. First is that the fuel sensor is a float sensor and can read erroneously when the car is pointed steeply up or downhill. Thus, when it returned to being level it read correctly. This was my biggest concern.

Or, the engineers could have programmed it to not tell a range below 100km in the hopes that this would force the driver to find the closest possible gas station. That would be the least concerning since it would mean I had plenty of range. Or, the range predictor and fuel gauge were just messed up, which was also problematic.

I had already made it 1km on the flat, so if I had enough fuel to make it that 1km back, then I could coast down hill in neutral and reach a gas station at the base. Or, if the car really was totally empty, worst case I could walk 10km down hill to a gas station and bring a liter of fuel back up.

Either way, I figured I might as well tag the peak first and sort out the car situation later. I started walking at 1130am and soon reached the turnoff Travis had parked at. This is at a building next to a small dam.

Beyond there is a fork in the road, with the right fork the correct route. But the road is only passable with 4×4 and high clearance. I hiked up the steep road, past a small refuge, then traversed left on a road at 1650m.

Near the end of this road I started seeing occasional red trail markers. When I reached a stream the road ended and I hiked up through open grassy slopes on the right side. I brought a stick with me in case the sheep dogs were problematic. I’ve found in eastern Europe all dogs know to run away when you hold a stick over your head. Though in the US dogs generally haven’t learned to avoid this.

I noticed a shepherd with his dog and a bunch of sheep above me, but they were moving away and I didn’t have any trouble.

I took a break at Black lake, and continued following a poorly-defined trail in the grass with occasional markings.

By 2pm I reached the summit, marked with a white post saying RK and RM (I assume Republic of Kosovo and Republic of Macedonia). There was also a big metal eagle structure on top.

I mounted the DA2 on the highest bedrock and logged data for an hour. I was happy to see many satellites show up immediately. A few days earlier on Mt Ararat in Turkey I wasn’t able to acquire satellites on the summit because Turkey jams the GPS signals in that area. Luckily there is no such problem in Macedonia/Kosovo.

There was another bump just to the north that looked like a similar height, so I took a brief measurement there too (it ended up being shorter).

By 330pm I headed down. The only other people I’d seen all day were the shepherd and two hikers way in the distance on a ridge. I made good time back, arriving at the car by 5pm.

I started it up and it was still giving a range of – -km. I drove carefully along the flat, making sure not to touch the brakes to waste fuel, then I was relieved to reach the downhill. I put the car in neutral and rode the brakes down 10km to the main route 402. Then I had to use the gas for 1km to a station in Negotino, where I filled up. In an overabundance of caution I topped it off to completely full. I reasoned I’d gotten a few scratches (also known as Sierra racing stripes) on the car from tree branches, and maybe if I invested in some extra fuel that would make the rental guys look the other way over the scratches and save me money overall.

I drove back to Skopje that night and processed the data using TrimbleRTX. I got Velika Rudoka is 2660.34m +/- 0.07m (95% confidence interval, EGM2008 geoid). This is very good corroboration of Matthew’s measurement of 2660.4m +/- 1.0m. He took a 10 minute measurement while I took a one hour measurement, which explains the accuracy difference.

There is no doubt that Velika Rudoka is taller than Djeravica. With my new measurement with tighter error bounds, even the seven sigma error ranges of the peak elevations do not overlap. So Velika Rudoka is definitely the country highpoint of Serbia.

 

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