Irhad Suljić

I grew up in Sarajevo and never quite left. The mountains that ring the city — Bjelašnica, Treskavica, Igman, Trebević — were where I spent my weekends as a teenager and where I now spend my working weeks. As a Tour Author for Tagmount, I walk every route I publish multiple times, in different seasons, and write the hour-by-hour Tour Handbooks that you receive when you buy a tour.

Outside of guiding, I work as a freelance journalist focused on environmental conservation in Bosnia and Herzegovina — protected areas, waste, water, the slow politics of keeping highland landscapes intact. That work shapes how I write a tour. The history is in there. The local food is in there. The reason a particular ridge has been grazed for five hundred years and not built over is in there. So is the reason it is fragile.

I run workshops on protected areas with school and university groups around the country. The line I keep coming back to in those workshops is that education means everything — that the people who walk these trails carefully are the people who learned, early, that they were worth walking carefully. A self-guided tour is a small version of that idea: a stranger arrives, walks a route respectfully, leaves it the way they found it, and goes home knowing one more piece of this country than they did the day before.

If you buy one of my tours, you'll get the route, the timing, the hazards, the food stops, and the small things — the spring at km 4, the shepherd's hut where you can sit out a thunderstorm — that turn a long day into a memorable one. Text me the night before. I like knowing who's on the trail.

— Irhad