Mt Erciyes: A birthday outing

To have a snow-capped mountain, fully visible in the moonlight, standing before you at 3 o’clock in the morning in perfectly still conditions is quite a unique experience. Despite not being entirely sure what lies in the hours ahead, the feeling is strangely calming.

For the last two years, I have chosen to celebrate my birthday not in a pub (OK, so not solely in a pub) but climbing a mountain. This year was not going to be any different, and given we were in a majority Islamic area in Central Turkey during Ramadan, the options presented were fairly limited anyway. The answer was right in front of us, literally. Mt Erciyes is a stratovolcano that stands alone among the surrounding planes, staring you in the face, slowly seducing you from afar whilst you’re trying to concentrate on more immediate matters. More immediate matters, in this case, being the cave cities of Cappadoccia, which really are incredible and deserve an article of their own, but that will have to wait.

So it was after very little debate we found ourselves in front of the east face, the distant glimmer of head torches from a team of early (earlier) risers an indistinguishable distance ahead of us, heading for the long ridge leading to the summit. With the exception of the altitude, which we both suffered from having started at around 2700m, the climb was relatively easy; the path passing through a series of snow fields and scree until we reached a large rocky outcrop, requiring a steep snow traverse below to re-join the ridge. Steps in these conditions require absolute certainty; a trip could quite easily lead to a long fall / slide a thousand odd meters down the east face. This makes the whole process incredibly tiring as you kick steps into the snow every time before moving forward, and at 7am, with the Turkish sun now on us in force, this was not fun.

In alpinism the sun brings other problems too. As the temperature rises above zero, as any good geography teacher will tell you (thanks mum), the variation in temperature brings rise to the freeze-thaw effects of erosion. And by ‘erosion’ I mean rocks, lots of them, falling around you. The main aim of leaving early is to avoid this (and other temperature related hazards), so when you encounter rock-fall on your way up – knowing you have to take the same route back down in an hour-or-so’s time – you are not filled with optimism. You might think the earlier group were better off, but moving together with 18 people on one rope is, unsurprisingly, a slow way to climb, and we had passed them by 5am. By the time we saw them again we had returned back under the outcrop on our way down. They had been up at midnight and can’t have got back to camp until well into the afternoon – a long day by anyone’s standards.

We arrived just below the western summit of Erciyes at around 7:30am and joined a narrow snow ridge heading west to the true summit. We knew from earlier research that the western summit, the true summit, required 10-15m of exposed rock-climbing on loose rock. Ever the optimists, we had carried the various metalwork to be able to make this final climb, however on arrival, the term ‘loose rock’ turned out to be, at best, an understatement. Imagine a riverbed made up of silt and the occasional pebble, rock and boulder. Now imagine taking a small, 15m deep section of this riverbed and planting it on top of Mt Erciyes, with a drop of several hundred meters below. Now imagine climbing it.

Needless to say we chose not to, so after a few photos on the eastern summit, we made with haste back to the ridge, traversed under the rocky outcrop – thankfully without incident, and had a well-deserved second breakfast above the clouds.

Alice on the summit

Alex on the summit

View of ridge leading from the Eastern Summit to the Western

View back towards the gendarme from the Eastern Summit

A stop for second breakfast

We made it back to camp at around 10:30am, steeped in glory and looking for a place to celebrate. Unfortunately Kayseri, the nearest city, is apparently the second most Islamic city in Turkey, so P-A-R-T-Y-I-N-G was off the cards. But I’d always wanted to spend my 31st birthday camped in the middle of the vast Anatolian Planes anyway.

A technical report is available here.