Greece Part Two: Adventures in the Southern Pindos

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.

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.

The road in the morning

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.

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.

Distant Mountains

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.

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.

Descending Loupata

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.

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.

Marosa

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.

Approaching Marosa

Marosa's isolated main summit

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.

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.

Avgo

Hellebore

Crossing a stream

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.

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.

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.

Greece Part One: Mount Olympus, Sea to Summit to Sea

Tom Hill and Rob WM recently took a trip to the mountains of Northern Greece, here is Rob's take on the beginning of their trip:

Mount Olympus, the home of the Ancient Greek Pantheon, Visible from the cities of Larissa to the South and Thessaloniki, in the old Kingdom of Macedonia across the bay. Its summits often wreathed in cloud, the mountain rises up out of the blue waters on the Mediterranean Sea and soars in to the heavens. About its feet the little pan-tiled villages and shady olive groves that lend rural Greece a picturesque quality, rather like Cezanne’s paintings of France and Spain.

Seaside ghost town

Camping Chalets

View of the mountain

At 2918m, Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece and stands about 18km from the coast at Plaka Litochoro as the crow flies. The first three days of our trip to Greece were spent walking from the edge of the sea to the summit of the highest of the major peaks of Olympus, Mytikas, and back again.

Olympus is a big mountain massif with several refuges on its flanks. Most of these are not open in the early spring so it was decided early on that we would make use of refuge ‘A’ which is the closest to Litochoro and low enough (2100m) to make a sensible target for a first day starting from the sea at Plaka. (The open refuges are on the Muses Plateau at 2700m). The way to this refuge follows the Enipea river through a limestone canyon of gargantuan proportions and should provide a dramatic entrance to the range. From refuge ‘A’ we would summit, and then descend on the third day, possibly by crossing to the higher ridge on the north side of the Canyon to begin the descent.

A frenzied week prior to leaving saw various pieces of equipment being acquired and organised and myself and Tom packing our shared hold-luggage bag in my lab in Queens Building on Wednesday. On Thursday evening we left on the latest possible train to Stansted and spent a miserable few hours in the airport before the gate to our flight opened at about 5 on Friday Morning. Friday afternoon was dull and slightly rainy as, exhausted, we threaded our little hire car through the deserted streets of a sea-side resort ghost town. Out of season we found the only cheap accommodation that was still open, organised our food and gear and tried to make up for the night spent in the airport.

By the sea

Saturday morning dawned clear and fine and at a little bit after 0820h we set off from the seaside verandah at the bottom of the campsite, pounding up the main road to Litochoro in our heavy mountaineering boots, already baking in the Mediterranean sun that beat down on the olive groves and isolated houses and workshops to either side of the road. From the town we were already looking down at the sea behind us, but the snow capped summits of Olympus appeared no closer ahead.

Litochoro lies at the entrance to the Enipea Canyon, from which some of the waters collected by Olympus are drained towards the sea. The gorge is about 8km long before it opens out into a valley head below the main summits and cuts its way through outlying mountains well over 1000m in height. Down its length tumbles a steeply descending river, whose waters form beautifully clear pools, lightly tinted blue. The less rocky sides of the canyon are covered by beech woods and forests of larch, spruce and cedar, clinging on to the hillsides, whilst the steeper parts form sheer walls of variously tinted limestone, often many hundreds of metres high and punctuated by dramatic pinnacles and vast hanging caves. The path cannot follow the river because the terrain is often too steep, so it winds its way up and down the shallower southern flanks of the canyon, occasionally descending to the river and crossing timber bridges to the northern bank for a short time. In this way, an extra 750 to 800 metres of ascent (and corresponding descent) is added to the route between Litochoro and Prionia, where the tourist road up the valley ends. At the roadhead there is little sense that one is in meditterranean Greece, as steep fir tree clad mountainsides give way to the snows and the cloud base hangs in the trees, concealing from us the high peaks towering overhead.

Enipea Canyon

The river

Clear pool

In the final 3km, the path winds its way up 1000m of ascent to refuge ‘A’ which nestles just below the tree line at 2100m, perched atop an outcrop in the forest. We could just make it out in the clouds looking up from below and as the trail petered out just a few yards in to the first real snow, it became apparent that no-one had visited this place for at least a month, perhaps far longer, the hordes who climb Olympus each year are clearly mostly summer visitors.

Reassuring information

Signpost in the forest

Refuge in the clouds

We set up the tent on the hut platform and ate and melted several litres of water from the snow. As the sun sank behind the mountain, the temperature dropped dramatically and the clouds cleared. The twinkling lights of Litochoro seemed very distant and the sea and sky seemed to merge together in a blue haze.

Distant lights

That night was very cold, but gave way to clear blue skies in the morning and with much lighter packs we set out, climbing at first through the woods before finding a way to cross the steep gully separating us from Chonderomesorachi, the ridge leading up to Skala and Skolio. At this time of the year, the snow has already melted from the south side of this ridge, exposing grey limestone scree, but mostly we walked on snow, up away from the trees. To the south, a group of snowy, remote 2500+m mountains, and ahead a heavily corniced ridge carrying us North towards Skala and Skolio.

Outlying Hills

In the snow

Still occasionally passing waymarks for the E4 long distance path, the ascent seemed to take far longer than its 2km and 800m suggested, and as we trudged ever higher, through every type of snow, the cloud we’d been watching on the hills over our shoulders started to creep up upon Mytikas and Skolio.

At Skala peak the ridge turns a corner once again and the thickening cloud told us we would not have time to visit more than one of the three big summits of Olympus. Mytikas is the highest and from here the Kaki Skala route looked every bit as inviting as had been suggested. There were some teams ahead of us now who had come up from the military ski-centre or Christakis hut on the South Western slopes of the mountain. So we decided to head for Mytikas. The other teams had clearly roped up here and we did the same, thought the route ahead was not supposed to be difficult, it was better to have some security on the descent to the saddle.

The Kaki Skala

At this point a couple of things became apparent, the architecture of this mountain was on a far bigger scale than either of us had imagined and we were racing an unknown force in the weather. The clouds brought warmer air that softened the snow and then snow as they lifted, this went in cycles.

The descent to the saddle was not hard but it was sensationally exposed, a slip here would have seen us being funnelled into the first snowy gully we crossed on the way to the hut the previous evening, some 1000m below. Protection was hard to come by in the shattered limestone, but the occasional bolt had been fixed by guides working on the mountain.

North face of Skala

From the col, the sense of scale and grandeur of these mountains is again heightened as the dramatic, steep, North face of Skala comes in to view and the South Flank of Mytikas looms up ahead. For a strong team, the face on Skala would hold dozens of long steep ice and mixed lines when conditions were good. We traversed another area of steep, soft snow to the right hand side of the ridge and began the ascent of a couloir to another smaller col. Here we had to cross the first of the teams in descent, of which there were three, each three men to a rope. The ridge here wound steeply about the top of a large chasm to its left and up steeper loose mixed ground on the side of a subsidiary spur. There were bolts which the guided parties were using, and provided convenient crossing points, but even so we lost probably an hour or more to the process of negotiating them on the most technical section of the route.

Looking down the route

Visibility was poor now, and as we climbed a short 45 degree snow slope, thankfully still quite icy, leaving the last of the guided parties below us and came to the summit of a large pinnacle. For a while we stopped, puzzled, unable to see any continuation of the ridge in the cloud, and with steep drops all around, for a while we thought we were stood on the very top of Greece. As another thin patch of cloud passed through, we realised our mistake and spied the main summit of Mytikas, with its metal Greek flag away to the north, not much higher, but perhaps 100m distant. We were separated from it by a narrow technical ridge blocked by a bulky Gendarme. The going would not be too hard, but it might take us an hour to bypass the difficulties and that would certainly mean undertaking most of the walk out from Skala in the dark. It was snowing again, but quite warm, and with no certainty about the weather, and only our tracks to guide us safely across the gully far below, benightment was not a thought either of us relished.

Tom at our high point

So we boldly turned tail and fled. From sub-Mytikas, about 20m shy of the true top of Greece, descending soggy, dubious snow interspersed with awkward rocky steps, using the occasional fixed gear or dodgy axe-belay where our 30m of rope would not carry us to the next rock. On the final exposed turn before the ascent to Skala, I placed three poor nuts in the chossy blocks, though I knew the ground ahead was easier.

Safely back on top of Skala, we quickly unroped, and eating on the move began descending the way we had come. The snow was much softer now, both melting and being covered by a new layer during the day, meaning we sank deeply or slipped sideways where we hadn’t done on the ascent. The mountains all around were no less magnificent, but we had learned new respect for them. The craggy peaks of Olympus are very much alpine in scale and deserve the same kind of treatment.

Halfway between Scotland and the Alps

After the gully crossing, a final short descent through beautifully atmospheric cedar forest brought us back to the hut platform at about 1930h, twelve hours after we left that morning and with about half an hour of daylight left, longer than our enormous walk in. Wearily we ate lunch and dinner in one sitting and put ourselves to bed. We had come a very long way from the sea to within a few metres of the highest point in Greece, before being driven down by the weather and lost time.

Back in the Forest

Exhausted

Neither of us savoured the idea of crossing the Zonaria to the far side of the canyon for the descent, especially having seen it strafed by large avalanches the day before, so we returned on the Monday, via the beautiful Enipea canyon, revisiting the holy spring of St. Dionysus and marvelling once again at the sheer scale and beauty, and loneliness of this place. The descent was long and warm and humid, with occasional outbreaks of rain, and quite long periods of ascent as we wove our way down out of the canyon and back into Litochoro, where we ate, filled our water and resupplied whilst the cloud finally lifted off the mountain and allowed us to see where we had been.

Shrine of St. Dionysus

The E4 path

The final hour or so back to the sea passed quite quickly, we were barely aware of the guard dogs, though on the descent of the canyon we noticed many things that we had been too exhausted and working too hard to see on our way up.

At the entrance to the park

Olympus dwarfs Litochoro

The final walk to the sea

Back at the coast

The receptionist at the campsite made us fruit tea, and failing to find an open bar or taberna by the coast, we ate some of our supplies and went directly to sleep, aware of a very hard job well done, but frustratingly not quite finished. Olympus will call us back, but whether we shall walk the entire length of the canyon again remains to be seen. There are easier approaches to the hill that would allow more time to be spent on the mountain itself and easier routes to the summit, though the harder looking, more technical ways, of which there look to be plenty hold more appeal. We shall return, and perhaps we shall meet the man whose path we crossed on a motorway bridge about 1km from the shore who had ridden his laden mountain bike there from Venice, through the Balkans and had allowed himself three days to cover the 450km or so to get his flight from Athens; he certainly seemed excited by our adventure, as we were by his.

Free of cloud

Provisions: 'Squeeze and Tap'