The White Drin Waterfall at Radavac is the place where a river is born, in the Accursed Mountains above the city of Pejë in western Kosovo: rain and snowmelt that sank into the limestone of Mount Zhleb burst out of the cliff here as a spring and immediately fall 25 metres into a gorge, so that the White Drin begins its 175-kilometre run to the Adriatic with a waterfall. The spring is the outflow of an underground river, and the Sleeping Beauty cave beside it is not a chance neighbour but the river's old front door, a spring cave hollowed by the same water that now emerges below it, first pushed into by explorers in 1968 and opened with a lit walkway that leads a few hundred metres into the hillside past rimstone pools and columns; the short walk up from the village of Radac runs through damp beech forest, with the temperature dropping as the gorge nears, and the trees open onto a clearing straight across from the fall, close enough that the roar arrives with a cold breath of air and a mist that settles on the face. The water comes out of the rock clear and cold all year, and in deep winter the moss and the rocks around it are stiff with frost while the fall keeps pouring.
The snowmelt off the mountains sinks into the limestone and reaches the spring weeks later, driving the fall at full roar in late spring, and by late summer the curtain thins sharply; in late October the beech forest on the path turns copper and gold around the white water. The fall is a few kilometres from the Rugova canyon, a gorge of a thousand-metre walls with a via ferrata and a zipline, and from the Patriarchate of Peć, a medieval monastery of frescoed churches at the canyon's mouth, so the three are done in a day from the city. The White Drin is a river that starts with a waterfall, and the mountain that swallowed the rain gives it back here.