a comment in Slovak and who objected to where the inscription spoke of the Hungarian (ethnic) nation in reference to all the subjects of the Kingdom of Hungary. Lower nobleman , an influential publisher based at Liptovský Mikuláš 20 miles from Kriváň, and his six friends climbed to the top of Kriváň on 24 Sept. 1835, which he described in the literary journal Hronka in 1837. The account may have stimulated its readers who lived farther away to follow their steps. The ascent that became most memorable in Slovak culture was by Ľudovít Štúr, then a 25-year-old teaching assistant of Slovak at the Bratislava Lutheran Lýceum (a preparatory high school and college). In the summer of 1841 he traveled through the Slovak counties with his private Greek student Prince Aristarchos and stopped at Michal Miloslav Hodža's parish at Liptovský Mikuláš, whose younger brother Juraj was Štúr's student at the lýceum. Štúr and a group of locals, Fejérpataky Belopotocký among them, hiked to the top of Kriváň on 16 August, its first recorded ascent that included women. National excursions A similar hike, without Štúr, took place the following year, and then sporadically later. Their organizers called them "national excursions" with increasing frequency. They were constituted as an annual late-August event by the authorities at Poprad in 1955 in order to commemorate the anniversary of the uprising of 1944. The attendance reached 480 people in 1981. They have continued with a broader national designation through the present. The National Ascent of Kriváň (Národný výstup na Kriváň) is an annual two-day event on the third weekend in August organized by the Slovak Tourist Club, Matica slovenská, and the towns of Vysoké Tatry and Liptovský Mikuláš. The number of persons allowed to ascend the summit on each of the event days is limited to 300. Access The three marked hiking routes to Kriváň start at different locations, but all ultimately converge at the elevation of about 2,145 m (7,035 ft.) for the final ca. 350-meter (1,150-foot) steep, rocky ascent to the summit − the only segment where both hands may be needed to maintain balance in places. The trailhead of the blue-marked trail is on the road between Štrbské Pleso and Pribylina, the color stays the same to the summit; elevation gain ca. 1,300 m (4,265 ft.). The green-marked trailhead is on the same road closer to Pribylina at Tri Studničky, the green trail