Following my post from a few months back (
https://ukbouldering.com/board/index.php/topic,29542.msg569272.html) I thought I would briefly write up my findings. I didn’t find any information about bouldering close to Athens but I was still keen to sample some Greek rock. So after the conference I caught the train up to Meteora, with the idea of spending some time walking around the amazing conglomerate towers there and visiting the bouldering spot of Rizoma. It would be a slight overstatement to say I wasn’t blown away by the place. There are a few great problems and the location is stunning but overall the bouldering is not fantastic. The rock quality ranges from very hard to little more than vertical sand and many problems were too dirty to attempt. Despite this, I thought I would leave this here in case someone else finds themselves in the same situation as me, or else to warn people to avoid!
Some info on the place here:
https://www.thecrag.com/climbing/greece/area/1115243010http://www.oocities.org/rizomaboulder/The crag is about a twenty minute drive from Kalabaka or Trikala (or a very long walk!) and there is a bus to the village from Trikala. The map from one of the above links has the crag in the wrong place so to find it refer to the UKC entry I have created. The rock type is sandstone (apparently) and ranges in texture from skin friendly to cheese grater with most problems somewhere in the middle. When the crag was first developed the problem numbers were painted on to the rocks font style, most of these have peeled off but it’s still pretty easy to locate the problems. Landings are generally good, one pad is fine for most of the up problems. There are two ‘zones’ making up the crag. Zone A is the area around the car park. To get to ‘zone B’ you walk west from zone A contouring around a wide and shallow gully in the hillside, then, after maybe 150m you walk up hill to find the problem Mindtrap. In my opinion this looked to be the only worthwhile problem in zone B. It crosses a huge roof on mainly big holds with a great staring sequence involving a sort of dynamic campus sequence to hold a swing. It is graded as 6B+/C but I thought solid 7A, maybe 7A+. There are a few more good problems at zone A. A cool undercut arête called Caretta-caretta (7A+, felt very soft though), Dark side of the Moon (6C, soft again) and Kirki (6C, nails) are pretty good.
There is also a cool looking highball featured in this video:
I don’t know the name or grade but probably mid sevens. It is not on the topo but you can easily spot it in the upper tier of zone A.
On the way home my flight was delayed and I spent the time very productively, making a video of some clips I filmed whilst there. I hope you find it amusing.
Overall, don’t make a special trip to visit but it might be worthwhile if you’re at a very loose and a have nothing better to do!
