Bozburun Dağı with Özgür, Philipp, and Ferda

Bozburun Dağı at 2504m is the highest peak that we can regularly see looking east from our apartment in Antalya, and I had never climbed it. (On very clear days we can see higher stuff even farther to the east, and of course looking west there are many closer and higher summits.) Philipp can also see Bozburun from his apartment, and he’s been trying to summit every peak near Antalya so it’s a bit surprising that he hadn’t been up Bozburun either. (BTW, Sivri Dağı is still on his list!) Özgür had probably been up Bozburun before, but he’s not really sure as he followed his father up heaps of mountains around Antalya when he was a kid.

The drive is kind of far (over two hours), but with Özgür’s fancy car we were able to continue up the forest road all the way to about 1300m.

The walk ended up taking about 7.5 hours, half in the forest and (the funner) half above treeline. It didn’t seem so steep going up, but it felt surprisingly steep the whole way going down. I was the only one to bring poles, and I was glad I did.

There were some good photo opportunities near treeline.

This was the end of May, and there was still a little snow higher up.

From the summit you can see Ovacık Dağı (called Keriz Dağı (1966m) on osm apparently) to the south and also the only through road between Bozburun and Ovacık which is very nice bicycle touring.

Philipp brought his drone so he took photos like this:

It looked like we might get caught in a good storm, but there wasn’t any lightning so we weren’t so worried. In the end I don’t think it even rained (on us).

The descent, however, was not uneventful. Ferda slipped on loose pebbles and landed very hard on her rib, bruising it. As anyone who’s done this knows, bruised ribs are rather painful and take some time to heal (about two months in this case).

Thanks for the great day — especially Özgür for driving and Philipp for treating us to the tasty piyaz-köfte dinner in Gebiz.