Climbing Articles
A cursory glance at a map might not indicate that the mountains around Antalya are of any particular interest to mountaineers. In a country where the mountains rise to above 3000 metres as you go eastwards, you may well dismiss these dwarfs as hardly worth your attention. But you will be mistaken. The mountains here are younger and steeper than their counterparts elsewhere in Turkey, and most interesting of all, some of them rise straight out of the sea towards the sky. This means that the climbing height is virtually equivalent to the summit height given on the map, and for some climbers it is the length of the climb not the altitude of the the mountain which counts.
In March three years ago we decided to climb Mount Tahtalý (2363 m), one of the steepest mountains near Antalya. The point where we left our car was just 110 meters above sea level. After a walk through thick forest we reached the first rock at 400 meters, and proceeded to climb almost 2000 meters in weather conditions that included everything you could think of: gales, mist, and near the summit firm snow. It was impossible to fit such a long climb into a few hours and we spent two difficult nights on the ridge. In short, this was by no means the soft hike implied by the map.
None of the peaks which fill the skyline west of Antalya are higher than 2600 meters, and some of the most fanglike are not even 2000 meters. But for those wishing to climb high rock walls this terrain conceals scores, perhaps even hundreds, of long climbing routes.
