From Sea to Summit: Mt Olympus, Greece

It was never part of the original Plan, but after a Murray family summit attempt of Mt Olympus was thwarted by a narrow ridge and hysterical younger sister some 17 years ago, when we found ourselves in the area, business had to be finished.

Of course now older and stronger (maybe not wiser), a standard summit attempt was never going to satisfy: If a 13 year old boy can (nearly) do it then two fully fledged adults can surely do it faster, and from further. As such we found ourselves setting our sights on the summit of Mt Olympus (2918m) starting from the sea (0m – just in case you didn’t know) in a day, some 30km each way.

You might think this sounds optimistic.

It was. Fresh snow at the summit meant that we’d now have to do this with big boots and crampons as a minimum. Not exactly fast and light. With a light trip off the cards, the obvious alternative, whilst ensuring suitable challenge, was to go the other way – add camping gear and two days’ worth of food to the load.

For anyone who is familiar with climbing mountains, you will know that it is the descent, and not the ascent, that really hurts. Never has this been more true than with Mt Olympus. Having started from the beach town of Leptokarya the first two hours is a fairly dull hike to Litochoro, where the trail starts (that’s right, we stubbornly walked 10km along a main road just so we could start right on the beach). From here you enter the bottom of a large gorge, in which the path arduously takes you to the top of the canyon and back to the river, repetitively, for what seems like forever. This path, the home-stretch, at the end of a long two days of hiking, is not your friend. The 13 year old Alex learnt this the hard way; the 30 year old one apparently did too.

Exhibit A:

At the top of the canyon the path reaches a car park and café, Prionia, the start of the hike for anyone with any sense. From here the path, now littered with walkers of all shapes and size – many clearly not accustomed to a hard walk, climbs consistently for some 1000 meters to Spilios Agapitos Refuge (Refuge A) where we paid 3 EUR each to pitch our tent and very quickly decided that we’d earnt at least one glass (read ‘bottle’) of red wine.

Sunrise from the refuge

After a surprisingly comfortable night’s sleep (that’ll be the wine), the climb up to Skala, one of the lower summits in the Olympus range - and the end of the road for 13 year old Alex, was a fairly straight forward plod in knee deep snow, led by a rather unlikely guide.

From here the crampons went on for what turned out to be quite a treacherous traverse of the summit ridge over rock and wet snow – not very much fun (particularly the descent – sense the theme), but failure a second time was not going to be taken likely.

Is that Zeus?

We summited at around 10am and up to this point it had been largely fun and games, the next 8 hours back down to Litochoro (descent of around 2900m) were anything but. We eventually arrived back in Leptokarya at around half 7 in the evening, I’d like to say by foot but apparently we looked like people desperate for a lift, and we certainly weren’t in the mood to decline one. After a cold beach shower, we were very kindly, and by complete chance, treated to dinner by Annie and her husband, whose name evades me, at Alfa Café – if you ever happen to be in the area, then their salads are just great!

Of course, as you can imagine, salads were not the only thing we consumed that evening, or the next day as we looked back across the Aegean Sea at our accomplishment, now unable to walk.

A technical report is available here.