Mount Olympus

….time again for another mountain……

Light rain was greeting me in the morning, as I stepped out of Spilios Agapitos, the central mountain refuge of EOOS, the Greek Federation of Mountaineering Club.

This was not a great day to summit the highest peak in Greece, but as the recent torrential rain had destroyed the water supply to the hut, leaving it without running water and – worse – any sanitation, this was also not a good place to stay….

Thankfully Giosos Apostolidis, the highest refuge of the massif, based on Muses’ Plateau, had a spare bed, so that I decided to spend an extra day in the mountains and now there were just 600 altitude meters to cover to reach my next stop. This was a nice change to the nearly 2000m I had scaled the previous day, when starting this trip in the small village of Litochoro, close to the Aegean Sea.

It was the beginning of October and before attending another Eastern European Regional Veterinary Conference in Thessaloniki, I had a bit of time to kill. So what better than hiking to the top of another of Europe’s epic mountains ?

The hike the previous day went through a deep gorge, most of the time in a lush forest, along a river with a lot of water falls, pools and even a natural spring underneath a rock ledge.

This for many years had been the home of a hermite and it eventually proofed to be an ideal location to build a small monastery nearby.

The walk to the refuge had taken longer than expected and I arrived at Spilios Agapitos just before sunset.

The hike from there the next day to Giosos Apostolidis was, albeit much shorter, fairly steep and because of the rain the ground was slippery.

In the middle of the trail, out of the mist, appeared suddenly a huge dog. These dogs are normally used by the local shepherds to guard their flock against wolfs and even bears and it is advisable to give them a wide berth .

Thankfully some locals turned up a moment later and I complemented them on their (thankfully) gentle giant. As it turned out, it wasn’t their dog either ….. but one of a pair that were seemingly living on these trails during the summer months. Not harming anyone and not chasing any wildlife, they were living off handouts from hikers and of left overs of the mountain huts. I met the other dog near the summit the next day.

Making this detour and spending an extra day on the mountain had been a good idea, as the weather eventually improved and both in the evening as well as during the whole of the next day, there was just a blue sky without any clouds.

This provided me with a lot of great photo opportunities of the summit from the small chapel of Profitis Ilias

and I realised, that on my ascent, I had walked right through a whole herd of mountain goats without spotting a single one of them in the fog…..

With weather like this, it meant an early start the next day to catch the sunrise over the Aegean Sea and to see the light reflecting from Greece’s highest mountain.

Followed by a short breakfast with an obligatory Greek coffee, I then set off on a spectacular traverse just below the summit.

The path eventually made a sharp turn and ascended steeply North to a high alpine plateau and to Scala, one of the nearly 50 sub summits of Olympus.

What was left, was a scamble for another half an hour and eventually I was standing on Mytikas, with 2918 m above sea level the highest peak in Greece.

Arising from out of nowhere and standing on its own with a diameter of just 26 kilometers, being just 18 kilometers away from the coast, catching the first sunlight in the morning and providing a unique navigation point to a nation of seafarers through the millenia, it is no surprise that this place was believed to be the home of the Gods.