Climbing Articles
It is January and you are rock climbing with your closest mountaineering friend. Perhaps there seems nothing out of the ordinary about this. A look at the January issue of any mountaineering magazine on sale at the airport will certainly reveal photographs of numerous climbers engaged in just that. The difference is that they are probably climbing in icy Arctic winds at temperatures well below zero in the Alps or perhaps northern Scotland. These are legendary climbs demanding special clothing and extraordinary endurance. With shocked admiration you read the challenge to death in their eyes.
What
I refer to is nothing of that kind! It is January but you are wearing
a woolen shirt and heavy duty trousers. The rock does not freeze your
hand as you grasp it, nor you are sweating. The sky is a sunny blue, a
mild breeze blows gently, and air is filled with the scent of the sea
mingling with that of orange trees.
Far from being mere fiction or the blurb of an over optimistic tourism brochure, these are the conditions under which I and my climber friend Sorgun made the ascent of Çamdağı behind Antalya in January. We were just 500 meters above the sea, which stretched to the horizon almost beside us. The air was as sweet as that of the Alps in summer.
When our descent was over we went down to the seashore. The January sun had just disappeared behind the mountain range on the western horizon. I threw myself into the Mediterranean for a refreshing swim after the tiring climb. The water was certainly not as warm as I remembered it from August, but it needed no heroism to go in. By the time I surfaced and looked up at the snowy peaks over 1500 meters above, I was accustomed to the cold, and enjoyed my swim with undiluted pleasure.
