Hobbies – Climbing
"... la Montagne est le lien entre la Terre et le Ciel. ... Elle est la voie par laquelle l'homme peut s'élever à la divinité, et la divinité se révéler à l'homme."
René Daumal, Le Mont Analogue. Roman d'aventures alpines, non euclidiennes et symboliquement authentiques
I was introduced to rock climbing at the tender age of 50, by
Tzortzis Milias, a dear friend who is a chemistry teacher in Athens and a well-known persona on the Greek mountains. I have been enjoying my training with Tzortzis in Greece, including on
the island of
Kalymnos, a world-class climbing destination, indoors and outdoors climbing in and around the Boston area with MIT students and colleagues (Kuang Xu,
Guy Bresler,
and many others), and some memorable adventures.
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August 2016 - Yosemite Snake Dike.
Tzortzis made the long trip from Greece to San Francisco and led on the
Snake Dike (5.7R) route to the top of
the Half Dome, in Yosemite.
A
description of the trip (in Greek) was featured in the mountaineering magazine
Κορφές ("Peaks").
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April 2014 - Nireas, Symi, Greece.
The picturesque Aegean island of Symi is endowed with a variety of
sports routes and
a spectacular 300+ meter
vertical wall.
With Tzortzis leading all except for the easier first pitch, I followed along the Nireas route (250 meters, 6c/5.11a, marked yellow in the picture; for a sense of scale, notice the large sailboat at the bottom left corner). Five years later (April 2019), we went back for a successful repeat.
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