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With the start of the active nature tourism season, a newly built wooden viewing platform in Niedrāju-Pilkas Bog is available to visitors.

The 6-meter-high viewing platform offers a beautiful view of the vast bog landscape. The platform is located on the edge of the bog on a forest strip separating two parts of the bog. The previous viewing platform had served its time and was dismantled last year.

The Niedrāju-Pilkas bog can also be explored by taking a walk along the approximately 1 km-long boardwalk. The trail begins and ends at the former embankment of the Smiltene-Valmiera-Ainaži narrow-gauge railway.

The improvement and construction of recreation areas in bog territories is one of the most complex tourism infrastructure improvement works, since in swampy areas, it is difficult to deliver building materials to the specific construction site, as well as to carry out the construction work itself.

Kaspars Judzis, recreation infrastructure management specialist at JSC “Latvian State Forests” (LVM), explains:

“As it is not possible to move around the swamp area with heavy transport units, the construction materials were transported to the new platform site via the existing footbridge. Before the freeze, it was done with a specially designed pallet on wheels, which can be pushed by hand, but during the freeze, with a quadricycle.”

44 cubic meters of timber were used in the construction of the new viewing platform.

In the Latvian State Forests, more than 300 free recreation areas created and managed by LVM are freely accessible to everyone - observation towers and platforms, cycling trails, well-maintained campfire sites, canopies, footbridges, and recreation areas by rivers and lakes.