Kaçkar Mountains: Chilly Air, Fog & Stunning Views

After pushing the rest of Lycian Way route to a later cooler date, we arrived in Trabzon yesterday. We rented a car and drove through Rize to Ayder yaylası in Kaçkar National Park. Corey was quite moved by what he called the Swiss landscape. I visited a number of times in the past for travel and work (where you have mountains and streams, you have mini-hydros), but the landscape still impresses one anew every time. The lush mountains, chilly air and the fog of the Northeast coast was such a contrast to dry and bushy Mediterranean landscape of the Southwest.

Ayder (elevation 1350 meters) used to be one of the lower yayla towns in this area, serving as stopover central for the many villagers coming from lower villages, where they live most of the year, to the many upper yayla towns at higher elevation, to where they migrate in the summer. Starting about 20 years ago and accelerating much in the past 10 years, it has become a big tourist attraction, with many many pansiyons cropping up in a somewhat unplanned and chaotic manner. The town is laid out along a mountain road since the hills do not leave much ground for sideway extension. So it snakes up the road for quite a bit and I was told that during peak tourist season it can take 1.5 hours of traffic jam to get from one end to another. Lucikly we arrived at the very end of the season, so it is not too crowded.

We are staying at Istanbul Pansiyon - a 150 year-old wood and stone house that is typical of the region. The family who owns it has had it for 6 generations. They now run it as a pansiyon during the summer and live in İzmir the rest of the year. Of course the charm and quaintness of a yayla house also include wooden outer walls of zero insulation and some cracks. Given our troubles with the heat a few days ago, it may surprise you, but it gets down to 3 degrees Celsius at night at night here, with the inside bedroom temperature not being so different. I was a bit worried about this at first, but the very thick comforters they gave us proved amazingly warm - with the need to stick out my toes from under the covers a few times to cool off.

Oh! We also had the local specialties of muhlama (a type of fondue with local cheese, butter and corn flour) and kara lahana sarması (black cabbage dolmas) for dinner. Corey has covered immense ground in becoming an honorary Turk, but scandalized me by trying the sarma with muhlama draped over it. No words.

The Kaçkar National Park is fantastic for hiking and there are a number of guided 7-8 day hikes that cross the mountain range from the Rize side to the Erzurum side. We found however that most of the current tourists that visit Ayder do not seem to be doing any hiking, the National Park information office is not manned, the trails are not marked, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the internet do not have any readily available trail maps (there is a private book you can order and then they can send you GPS coordinates upon confirmation of purchase, but since we came on short notice, no dice). Somewhat appalling. Perhaps we are wanting to play it safe generally, but the weather is finicky in the mountains with possibility of dense fog every day, so we did not find the lack of maps/GPS/trail marking very comforting.

After asking around multiple people in Ayder, we picked the apparently most often travelled day trail from Yukarı Kavrun Yaylası (about 2500 meters) to a number of lakes 650 meters above. The last 20 minutes of driving to Yukarı Kavrun Yaylası was a bit harrowing, even though dolmuşes go there daily. It is a dirt road with large rocks embedded in the ground and large potholes in mud due to the road being washed out through many seasons. The hike was absolutely worth it though - just stunning views. (There were also some cairns marking the trail, but many cairns for many different paths.) The fog indeed moved in with super speed as we were descending, but we made it back to Yukarı Kavron on foot and then to Ayder by car without trouble for some well-deserved lentil soup and tea.