Climbing Serifos Island Photo by Thaddeus Laird

Serifos Island is a ferociously hot lump of goat turds and thorn weed sitting vacant beneath the nuclear sun of southern Greece. It is one of many islands of the Cyclades chain - a map of which reads like a bucket of jigsaw pieces tossed onto a yard of deep blue fabric known as the Aegean Sea. I was glassing Serifos Island from the port deck of Shasa: a 35-foot Dufort sailboat owned and operated by my Canadian cousin, Sarah, and her newly wed Irish husband, Wally, who were in the middle of a two-year sailing odyssey in the Mediterranean.

We were driving hard into a force 7 gale and Shasa was bucking along through the wave-chop like a freshly castrated bull. Juli, my girlfriend, was below decks, shouting numbers off the depth sonar. Everyone was supposed to be on the lookout for rocks. Except for me, who had made it my duty to be on the lookout for rock climbs.

After all, this was meant to be a two-week summer rock climbing reconnaissance in southern Greece, with the pesky pastime of sailing thrown in simply as a mode of transportation. At least for me it was.

Back home in Idaho, three months earlier, I had received the following email:

Little Cuz,

We met these Germans in Spain who told us about all this limestone down in southern Greece. Sport climbs, multi-pitch canyon walls, sea-side crags, ocean headlands. No other climbers in sight. We’re sailing through the Cyclades Islands in a few months, then over to the Argolis Coast of the Peloponnese Peninsula to a new limestone venue that no other climbers know about. Wanna come?

Love, Big Cuz

Being an avid rock climber with nausea issues, I instantly ignored the part about "sailing" and trotted off to the library in search of literature on the geology of southern Greece. Thumbing through a hefty tome on the subject, I noticed on nearly every page a set of tall gray cliffs blending with the dark blue folds of the Aegean. I quickly returned home and fired off the following reply:

Big Cuz,

Does one fly into Athens or take a ferry over from the Italian Coast?

Three months later, Juli and I were standing on a sun-splintered dock in the Cyclades Islands with two enormous backpacks at our feet. Juli was carrying all the rudimentary things of a Mediterranean expedition: sunhat, flip-flops, colorful sarongs, SPF 15 for the legs, SPF 25 for the shoulders, SPF 40 for the naked buttocks. But I was armed with all the important stuff: tequila, gin, Ibuprofen, an enormous free climbing rack, two ropes, several packets of Dramamine and a handful of barf bags I had swiped from the airlines. I was ready to tackle anything in sight. Thousand-foot headlands, 30-foot bolted clip-ups, three-foot boulder problems, I didn’t care. So long as I got my fix of one thing: little-known foreign rock.

"Point her in toward dat headland," called out Wally against the blare of the gale. Lowering the binoculars from Serifos Island, I noticed that he was directing us toward the same slice of limestone I had just been looking at in terms of potential rock climbing. It was a sheer, 500-foot tall bulkhead of rock perched on the very edges of the Aegean.

"Drop the main!" called out Sarah. In a flurry of rope tugs and ratcheting sounds the main sail exhaled onto the deck. The waves began to thin, the wind died, and Wally fired up the diesel.

Passing beneath the headland, I raised the binoculars once more. There, rising up the gut of it, was an enormous lie-back flake the shape of a Buddhist temple gong.

Wheeling around to the east, we slid past the base of the headland and tucked into a beautiful crescent-shaped cove with azure innards and a white strip of beach at its back. Our home for the next couple of days.