While traveling I feel the urge to climb the mountains around and if you ever travel to Kayseri Erciyes will tower over you taunting you to see if you can make it to the top. Erciyes is the 6th highest mountain in Turkey at 3,917 meters and is actually a dormant volcano believed to have last erupted in 6880 BC. Here is a summary of my day trip to the summit of Erciyes. 

A common occurence for us here in Turkey is that there seems to be a lack in communications when we are planning on heading out to the mountains. What seemed like it was going to be an easy journey to the Kackars turned out to be a rather humuorous one. Instead of simply joining up with a fellow buddy who lives here in Erzurum and taking his car out to the Kackars we found out the day before that he actually had no car. Finally, we made the plan to head to the otogar where a bus would then take us and our friend to our destination. Well, that didn’t happen.

Recently I’ve put a lot of thought into what defines ‘adventure.’ It could be anything that you don’t normally do – staying in a hotel for the weekend; exploring parts of the city that you’ve never been to; backpacking through Africa; climbing Everest without extra oxygen. Really, an adventure is anything that puts you out of your comfort zone, an extraordinary experience. To me, an experience really becomes an adventure when plans change and unexpected things start to happen. Well see how our Bike trip became an adventure.

Back when we were just planning our trip to Turkey and researching what it would be like, we were told by a few sources that Northeastern Turkey is very similar to Colorado: cold winters, hot summers, dry air, and high elevation. Well, that’s all true (this winter is unusually warm but we’ve had our cold days here for sure). Now what we wondered was, will Northeastern Turkey have great potential for skiing, rock climbing, and ice climbing like Colorado does?