More from Rob and Tom on their Easter Adventures to keep you distracted during revision:
After
Olympus, we had one day of organising our gear and
food and travelling and then a bad weather day in which we discovered an
amazing piece of culture that we’d only had a very vague prior idea about, the
Monasteries of Meteora. All this left us with one, possibly two days to explore
the area of the Southern Pindos in which we found ourselves. We had already
seen the dramatic, snow covered mountains all around Elati,
Nikolas had pointed
some of them out to us when we met on the night we arrived. Modest and
unassuming, Nikolas must be at the forefront of mountaineering in Greece. He
knows the hills of his own country very well indeed and works hard to promote hillwalking and mountaineering in the the country via the website
Hellaspath. He has also coordinated
numerous
expeditions to more exotic destinations, especially the mountains of
Northern Pakistan and India. From the panoramic windows of his cousin’s restaurant in
Elati, he had recommended a ridge traverse immediately to our South, beginning
on a hill called Mavropouli and continuing over Loupata, Marosa and Avgo. This
would take two days and whilst it was largely walking, contained some technical
sections. He advised against it should the weather be poor, so it was with disappointment
that we woke to rain on Wednesday morning.
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| Night-time view from Elati |
Not to be defeated however, we set off in clean air on Thursday morning to
tackle the centre portion of the ridge, with the most technical interest,
gaining Loupata from the North and Continuing over Marosa for as far as time
allowed.
We rose early and drove on tiptoes through the dark mountain
roads to the place Nikolas had recommended we park. We left the car at a
junction on a minor road and continued on foot, down over the river and up
through a small clearing to a left turning hairpin where we struck off up the
ridge into the forest.
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| The road in the morning |
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| Light in the trees |
There are no paths in these fir woods, and though managed to
a point they retain quite an open natural feel. From time to time the way we
took looked almost path like, at others we were pushing through low branches
and staying as close as we could to a vague ridge-line in the trees. The
darkness was punctuated by dappled sunlight and little sound as we climbed
steeply away from the river. We crossed a couple of forest roads and by and by
the little clearings became more frequent and the trees grew thinner and shorter
and we found more and more exhilarating little glimpses of view to either side
of the spur we were climbing.
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| Forested ridges |
Breaking out of the trees on to the open mountainside we
were confronted with a spectacular scene. We had already been walking on snow
for some hundreds of metres and the rounded spur on which we stood was oddly
reminiscent of the English lake-district or one of the softer corners of the
Scottish highlands. Away to the East and West, however, were snippets of
mountains from different continents, the forested ridges of the Appalacians
capped with the rugged crags of the Rockies to the North; the lochs and Glens
of Scotland to the East and West providing a footing for great snow-covered
alpine peaks and dry golden limestone crags like those of the Pyrenees or Vaud
Canton. All around was row after row of mountains marching off in ever receding
shades of blue as far as the eye could see.
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| Distant Mountains |
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| The view to the saddle |
As we climbed higher, exchanging the lead on almost perfect
virgin neve, punctuated with the occasional deep drift, the scale and
wilderness of this place became increasingly apparent. Though we were not far
from roads, they were clearly seldom used, and even less frequently been
strayed from and as the spur we were on joined the main ridge that swept up
from the saddle below Mavropouli, it became clear that we were the only people
to walk on this mountain certainly since the presently lying snow had fallen,
and given its consolidation that could be months.
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| Tom breaking trail |
Loupata is a rounded mountain on this side, a plateau with
three great curving summits rising up from it, each like a miniature version of
Skiddaw when viewed from our side, but steeper – in less perfect snow
conditions, the going would be hard indeed. The further side of these peaks
however was steep and craggy, vast cliffs as large as any mountain crag in the
UK formed what from the South would be a solid wall of mountain holding back
these peaks and making elegant swooping ridges between them. The crags were
steep, shattered golden limestone kissed with rime-ice and harbouring a few
small trees here and there.
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| Descending Loupata |
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| The main ridge looking back to Loupata |
We progressed across snow so sturdy we barely marked it,
following the undulations of the ridge, the vast country lay spread out below
us on both sides. The expanse and lonely beauty of this place were wonderfully
uplifting, and seemed to brush away the occasional tongue of cloud that washed
over the mountains. The further round the skyline we travelled, the more
dramatic the cirque on the steep side of the ridge became, though unlike the
northern side it was largely devoid of snow. At last we came to a subsidiary
summit some distance from Loupata where we must descend the top of the steep
crags to continue on the ridge, the correct descent line is via a vague rocky
couloir which is hard to follow from above, though we found the incut top of it
fairly easily. We downclimbed for four pitches of our 30m rope, winding down
broken, vegetated mountainside and belaying each other where we could until we
reached ground shallow enough to walk on where the onwards ridge protruded from
the base of the crag.
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| Tom on a belay |
This last episode took far longer in reality than it did to
describe, whereas the opposite is true of the spectacular views from the ridge
above. We probably spent an hour and a half taking turns to shiver on dubious
belays whilst the other picked their way delicately down through crags and
scruffy bushes, with the odd surprisingly technical move on fairly friable
limestone. If for a moment one were to face out from the crag, the view along
the wall of steeper cliffs bounding Loupata’s southern flank made a spectacular
frame for the surrounding landscape.
During our descent, the lower clouds had dissipated, giving
us our first view of Marosa, the next mountain in the chain. Its main summit is
a vast round topped pinnacle, surrounded by steep walls of rock, sometimes
undercut and linked to the main ridge via a short but exceedingly steep ridge.
The more accessible summit on which a man-made triangulation pillar stands, was
linked to where we stood by another long, elegant ridge, with cliffs once more
to our left and rolling, but often steep snow-fields to the right. The limestone
mountainside here is full of small twisted crags and sink-holes, pointing to a
landscape that is still quite actively shaping its own destiny.
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| Marosa |
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| Bear tracks in the snow |
Until this point in the day, we had clearly been completely
alone on the mountain, but now as we looked along the ridge there appeared to
be a set of footprints coming up to the saddle. In the bright snow it was hard
to make out exactly where they came from or went to, but it was clear that we
were not the only ones to traverse these hills in recent days as we’d thought.
However as we approached the trail, the spacing, though man sized, was noticeably
uneven, and on arrival in the saddle, we found that no human had made these
tracks, unless they had scaled the cliff behind us and descended towards the
crags and forest below; heading out of, rather than in to the wilderness. They
would also have had to possess several large claws on each foot.
After further observation and concluding that these tracks
disappeared behind a crag but did not reappear on its further side, we made as
much haste as we could up on to Marosa, in order to put as much ground as
possible between us and what could logically only be a bear, occasionally
scanning the vast snow field below for any moving shape, but there was none,
though in our minds eyes any of a number of boulders might have shifted itself
slightly, dozing in the mid-afternoon sun.
Even Marosa’s more rounded summit was a steep affair, and
the chord linking it to the rocky tower seemed uninviting given the time of
day. Seeing black clouds looming in a vast sprawling mass behind Avgo as that
final mountain in the chain came into view confirmed our decision to skip it
out, continuing the ridge would require us to descend into the vast corrie
between us and Avgo in any event, and if the weather looked unlikely to improve
we could descend the valley that it fed. A direct descent from the summit
seemed infeasible, so we descended a gentle ridge to the North for about fifty
metres before heading downhill into the corrie.
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| Approaching Marosa |
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Marosa's isolated main summit
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This descent probably took no more than 15 or 20 minutes but
it could have been hours or even days of carefully picking a way down steep
snowfields and through little crags, sometimes walking normally to traverse
from one area of clear snow to the next, but mostly facing in to the hillside,
which for the middle 100m or so of descent must have been rather steeper than
40 degrees and necessitated careful kicking of pigeon-hole steps, a tiring and
time consuming process. In places on this hillside the snow was soft from the
warmth of the day and not especially deep. The debris on the corrie floor
suggested that most of the winters snow cover had avalanched from this hillside
and what we were cautiously slithering our way down was the result of a couple
of recent large falls. In the first snow field we were startled by a solitary
peal of thunder from over Avgo, and though we heard no more, this only acted as
an encouragement to gain more stable ground quickly.
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| Tom on the descent |
Having safely negotiated this leg of the journey we found
ourselves in a vast bowl reminiscent of the Grey Corries but on scale so much
greater it is hard to describe – double the linear dimensions and the mountains
feel of a different order of magnitude. We had spied out the shepherds hut that
would have been a bivi spot if we’d done the entire ridge traverse and headed
for that not wishing to be caught out, even on a peak as amenable as Avgo
appeared from a distance.
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| Avgo |
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| Hellebore |
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| Crossing a stream |
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| Shepherds Hut |
We splashed through rushing meltwater streams where the
tongues of snow ended and crossed wild alpine meadows, rich with nodding hellebore
and golden king-cups, and by the hut joined a mountain road. The road dived
almost immediately into steep forest, clinging to its shallow topsoil and
frequently revealing twisted limestone strata like a section through a badly
folded blanket. This road had not yet been opened for the summer and sections
of it remained blocked by the winter’s landslips and avalanche debris. This
high up it was still only just spring. The cuttings where the road had been
laid on the hillside seemed keen to dislodge rocks on the unwary traveller and
we made our way past them fairly briskly. Occasionally we would turn and look
back, we were following another of Greece’s magnificent gorges, this one
wreathed in cloud and eerie in its remote splendour. The rivers we had crossed
on the mountainside as streams and again as wide rocky fords as we entered the
wood now thundered below us through inaccessible rocky alleyways and breaking
the surface of deep tree-locked pools.
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| Rain |
The road became recognisably more like a forestry track as
we descended, and there were even the signs of some human activity, and once in
the forest proper it began to feel like a very long road indeed. We marched on
in the rain, through the ruts of large forestry vehicles until we at last wound
our way down through a series of hairpins to the big valley out of which we had
climbed.
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| Forest road |
Once on back on the more major dirt road in this valley, we
covered the final 5.2km in just over an hour, winding our way back up the
river, watching it decrease in size and activity as we went. We were focussed
simply on returning now. It was late and there was little light left and it had
been raining for several hours. We had been so engrossed in making progress
over the mountains that we had neglected to pause for proper food all day, and
so it was wet and exhausted that we came over the last little summit in the
road to find the car parked up by the junction waiting for us. In thirteen and
a half hours we hadn’t seen another human being, though we’d been within a
kilometre of a village when we reached the road. These mountains are very
remote and wild, and we had used all of the available light that day exploring
a very small piece of them.
After wearily eating the food we had intended for lunch as a
makeshift dinner, we drove ourselves back to Elati through the heavy snow that
was now falling, and were kindly received at the hotel Kroupi. After two nights
of roadside camping and what had felt like the hardest day of the trip a hot
shower and proper beds were most welcome before the journey home began on
Friday morning.
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