Hi, my name is Ruben and I'm the person behind trecatori.ro.
As a passionate motorcyclist, every time a new riding season rolled around I'd spend hours digging through Facebook groups, InfoTrafic forums, and CNAIR pages trying to find out whether the Transfăgărășan was open... or the Transalpina... or the Transbucegi. More often than not I found the information I was looking for, but never from a source I could confidently come back to.
Right around the time I started toying with the idea of a portal for Romania's mountain passes, I stumbled across its Swiss counterpart: Alpen Pässe, which wasn't exactly my inspiration, but it was the nudge I needed to believe a portal like this could actually be useful to people. At the same time, while researching for this project, I also discovered that Romania doesn't have just 5 mountain passes, but many more. A lot of them I'd crossed over the years without even realising, and plenty more I only discovered after starting this project. I've included most of them on trecatori.ro, but a few I left out on purpose, either because they aren't commonly thought of as passes (see Pasul Feleac near Cluj), or because including it wouldn't add any useful information (see Pasul Ciucea).
The homepage lists the passes I consider the most important. The All passes and Map pages list every pass I was able to identify using Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and older printed maps.
Because no official authority defines the exact point of a mountain pass, I cross-referenced the coordinates from the sources mentioned above. Most of the time they lined up, but for a handful of passes the position is more of an estimate based on the highest point along a given stretch of road.
Current weather comes from the nearest weather station, whenever there's one within a 5 km radius of the pass. The forecast is provided by Open-Meteo.
Pass status is updated manually, but the site also polls the CNAIR dispatcher regularly and correlates the restrictions listed there with the roads that run through the mountain passes.
If you have ideas for improvements, spotted a mistake, want to help out, or trecatori.ro has been useful to you in any way, you can reach me via the contact form.