Mother abandons two sons on fog-bound Polish mountain trail to reach summit alone

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Mother leaves children alone on Poland mountain trail for 'whining' euronews.com

A mother left her two sons — a crying eight-year-old and his fourteen-year-old brother — on a fog-bound trail in the Bieszczady Mountains on Saturday, and continued to the summit alone because the boys were whining. The account comes from the Rzeszow branch of the Polish Tourist and Sightseeing Society (PTTK), which posted it to Facebook after its hiking group encountered the children near where the blue and yellow trails split above Muczne.

The mother had told the boys that if they did not want to walk, they should wait fifteen minutes. The summit was about an hour away. The boys, aged eight and fourteen, waited alone in thick fog for considerably longer than a quarter of an hour, and were looked after by shocked passing tourists until the mother reappeared — described in the PTTK post as a fit-looking woman. The younger son grabbed her hand and stopped crying.

When tourists pointed out that leaving underage children alone in the mountains in such conditions was dangerous, she replied coolly, according to the post, that she had only been gone for a moment, that she wanted to go higher, and that the children were forcing her to give up her planned goal. The PTTK criticised her for showing no sense of guilt and no reflection. She said sorry, the post records, only when told the incident could amount to charges from the public prosecutor — and when the author replied that the apology was owed to the children, not to him, there was no reaction.

The incident has been reported to local authorities and has drawn widespread outrage in Poland over parental responsibility on mountain trails. The younger boy had stopped crying by the time his mother took his hand. The older one, fourteen and bewildered at the trailside, had spent the wait watching the fog.