Darım Dağı (aka Göktünek Tepesi) with Semra and Bülent

Whenever I go up to Termessos, I look north and admire the steep south face of Darım Dağı. It’s first visible from the kind of steep switchbacks so if you’re feeling lazy and want a rest, you can use the good view as an excuse. The mountain is also visible from Termessos’ theater. See the good looking pyramid?

Here it is again from a bit further away up at the extensive Southwest (?) Mezarlığı (cemetery), scattered with so many lahit (sarcophagi).

I was up at Termessos again a couple weeks ago with Bülent and Semra, and he has also admired Darım Dağı for years. He even knew the name, Darım. I hadn’t know it before. We decided to make plans for a few days later and see if we couldn’t summit the thing.

We drove up passed Bayatbademli and parked near this çeşme:

We carefully inspected the route options, and the easiest choice appeared to be to follow the farthest right of the three rock ridges visible (barely, because of the trees) in the above photo. We were happy with how well we were able to stick to the route that we had chosen once we were actually on the mountain. However, we did make a mistake right at the beginning which meant that we bushwhacked through thick forest for longer than necessary. We were too far left (north). If you go, try and find the (faint at times, cairned at times) trail. It heads right (south) from near the water infrastructure for animals shortly after you enter the forest. Don’t be disturbed if it seems to be too flat and head too far south at first. It will eventually take you more steeply up the mountain. If you manage to find this trail, you’ll hardly be bashing through bushes at all.

The fun, of course, starts when you get on rocks a bit higher.

The interesting limestone rock formations reminded me of Yunnan’s (China) Stone Forest even though I’ve never been there (too much time looking at photos on the internet, I guess). The rocks reminded Semra of Adam Kayalar in Ballıbucak (Manavgat), a place she’s actually been to (and somewhere that keeps getting pushed up higher on my list of places to visit).

Looks fun, doesn’t it? When we got to the sun, we took a short break to eat a little.

And the fun continued.

The summit ridge is over a km long with a bit of up and down. We reached it more toward the northern end. At the north end is what osm calls “Göktünek Tepesi”, the highest point on the ridge. It looks like this:

The south end has a summit register (signed previously by only two groups), referring to the place as “Darım Dağı”. This is the top of the pyramid that we admire from Termessos. Here’s the view looking south:

The ridge itself is kind of fun as well, and we even found quite a few fossils.

We retraced our route to the car (with the exception that we found the aforementioned better route through the forest at the bottom), making it a casual eight hour day. Not knowing anything about the route we had carried a rope and some climbing hardware up with us, but none of that equipment ever left our packs.