“Arghh!” High on the wall, Tracy arcs gracefully through the air, abandoning her sprawled pose on small handholds for a swan-like dive into a no-hands rest, twenty-five feet lower on the end of the rope. Hanging the quickdraws on her project, she found herself hopelessly pumped and faced with a classic choice: clip or go. To do both was not an option. Choosing the latter, she missed a hold and flew.
The other climbers who have paused in their activities to observe her effort smile with approval — determination has trumped fatigue and fear, to be trumped in turn by a flaming pump. It is a beautiful thing. Tracy rests on the rope, opening and closing her hands, lightly kicking the wall and gazing up with a mix of amazement at the spectacular nature of her rejection and simple frustration at sixty feet of hard climbing repeated again for no credit. I sit back on the rope with a smile and gaze out at the sea.
“How many different ways can you fall off one climb?” she asks later, rolling her eyes, tender fingers wrapped around a cold Mythos beer at the cafe. “I don’t know, girl,” I tell her, “but that way was one of the best.”
We were actually invited to paradise, guests at an “international climbing festival.” As a tourist destination, Kalymnos struggles in the shadow of much more luxurious nearby resorts, and has embraced traveling climbers more warmly than almost anywhere I know. This festival expresses that. Its official aims are to promote cooperation and friendship between climbers, open new climbing routes, and “build the ties that form from getting to know the people, the culture, and the natural beauties of a place.”
Sounded good to us. Once on the island —we arrived by boat, the only way — we were immediately swept into the festivities. Our first encounter with the Greeks proved typical: George Hatzismalis, a handsome, suave man in his early forties, master troubleshooter for the event, met us at the port with a warm, “Kalimera, Jeff. Kalimera, Tracy.” Exuding a calm energy that completely belied the chaotic schedule he kept, he loaded our gear into his tiny car, then sped away, maintaining a constant narrative on the event and the culture of the island, with brief pauses to speak in rapid-fire Greek into his constantly ringing cell phone. Double-parking in a crowded street, George dashed into a hardware store where he secured a few drill bits, then headed inland to an outdoor café in a small plaza, where we rendezvoused with French climbing ace Daniel Dulac, who took possession of the drill bits, then disappeared in a cloud of dust toward some new crag on his scooter, as we continued on to festival central.
Aside from us and David Graham, who currently resides in Switzerland, the festival’s other invited guests were from Europe, and included many of the island’s earliest climbing explorers. Famous faces were everywhere — Liv Sansoz, Francois Legrand, and Daniel Dulac of France, Michel Piola of Switzerland, Andrea Di Bari and Manolo of Italy, Mirjam Verbeek of the Netherlands. There were journalists — David Munilla from the Spanish magazine Desnivel, Volker Leuchsner from Germany’s Klettern. Since so few Europeans speak the host language of Greek, the most widely used speech in the tourist zones of Kalymnos is English, rendering the international café tables unusually accessible to visiting Americans.
Central to the event was Aris Theodoropolus, the local expert on Kalymnos climbing. Personable and soft-spoken, Greece’s first professional mountaineer, Aris has been climbing for twenty-five years. He cut his teeth establishing adventure routes in the more traditional Greek areas such as Varasova on the south coast of the Greek mainland. Aris is a well-traveled skier and mountaineer as well as an excellent rock climber, with a resume from the Alps that includes ascents such as the American Direct on the Dru, and he now spends half the year on Kalymnos facilitating climbing-related activities. He is responsible for many of the area’s fine sport routes, to which we would sacrifice much skin.
