Be Fruitful, Multiply… and Ski the Earth! Andreas Hofer Realises His Childhood Dream – to Ski Mount Ararat

Be fruitful, multiply…

and ski the earth!

Andreas Hofer realises his childhood dream – to ski Mount Ararat

t is awe-inspiring to set eyes on Mount Ararat for the ﬁrst time: this colossus wished to go there and to have a look for myself. at I didn’t ski Ararat earlier was due to my provincial prejudice. Eastern Anatolia was to me synonymous with
Turkish Kurdistan is safe, good value and great fun. Admitedly, it is a devout part of the world, and somewhat archaic: the most common ways to earn

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of a mountain, with a base of more than 1,000 square kilometres, raises its glorious snowy crest out of a green, sea-like landscape with untamed drama. Solitary, solemn, it dwarfs every other elevation around. From the top of the cone-shaped, dormant volcano, at 5137 metres, one can see the plains of Anatolia, Iran, Armenia and the land-locked territories of Azerbaijan.
For many centuries, Mount Ararat – the national pride of the Armenians on the other side of the border and archaeological obsession of born-again Christians from all over the world - was considered unscalable. Hard to believe when one witnesses the well-oiled tourism machine today, which hauls hundreds of tourists each week up and down the mountain, summer and winter. vile daggers, danger and delhi-belly!
ere is of course litle a living are still animal husbandry, beekeeping and the smuggling of petrol and drugs. Drug traﬃcking is so notorious that many locals change the licence plates of their cars to Istanbul or Ankara codes in order to avoid continuous harassment by police and the military. If you are Kurdish, and since the tragic exodus of all Armenians prety much everyone is Kurdish here, you have trouble enough writing poems – let alone driving a van full of heroin. (Until recently, the mere use of Kurdish language

When the sun rose in the early

truth in this. People are armed nowadays with nothing more harmful than cell phones, and food is wholesome - if not vegetarian. And the business of abducting tourists, for many years successfully conducted by the PKK, the Kurdish resistance, is going out of fashion. e last German tourists were taken

morning hours on the other side of Mount Ararat, its coneshaped shadow pointed in a perfect pyramid over the plains west-northwest into Central

hostage in 2007. ere are still machine guns of all sizes and brands on display in high street shops, at good prices, but
I had wanted to ski this mountain since I was litle. Like most Austrian children, I had a model of Noah’s Ark to play with. e keel of my ﬂoating toy-container was rather ungainly – even I could tell that the thing had to run aground eventually, spilling plastic men and animals in pairs all over the world. I desperately

Anatolia

was considered subversive behaviour - an 'un-Turkish act' - and punished. Many Kurdish poets were incarcerated.)
All night, a snowstorm had pulled on the they collect dust these days. Why hold tourists to ransom when you can ﬂeece them instead?
But for the maddening traﬃc, travel in

28 | skiclub.co.uk

Raiders of the lost ark mountain

It is not clear to what purpose God created Lake Van.

I had wanted to ski this mountain since I was little. Like most Austrian children, I had a model of Noah’s Ark to play with. The keel of my floating toy-container was rather ungainly – even I could tell that the thing had to run aground eventually, spilling plastic men and animals in pairs all over the world.

e first man to successfully negotiate Mount
Ararat was the German mountaineer Friedrich Parrot (1929). And even he only succeeded at his third atempt. Many people have climbed it since, including James Bryce, a British scholar and politician, escorted by Tsarist Cossacks when he came to Ararat in the summer of 1876. Others include James Irwin, the US astronaut, looking for God and the remains of the Ark. He broke his leg and barely survived. e canniest was the Chinese documentary film-maker Yeung Wing Cheung, who - in April 2010 - aﬅer years of careful preparation, and to world-wide tabloid acclaim, ‘found’ Noah’s Ark in an ice cave under the glacier. is was just a year aﬅer he had carried up truck-loads of old planks himself, with considerable effort, and employing a host of local porters. It was not only a brilliant con, but an impressive mountaineering achievement too, considering how much trouble it took me just to carry my rucksack and me up the mountain.

Peoples came and went. The Urartians, mighty warriors and Assyrians’ deadly foes, built their fortresses and irrigation canals around the lake - constructions which can still be seen today. The Seljuk left their extensive graveyards with ornate mausoleums and finely chiselled tombstones and early Ottoman beys built gracile mosques, bridges and proud palaces.

With a coast line of 430km the lake is certainly vast. It looks more like an ocean than a lake. Its saline, oily waters are the breeding ground for pearl mullet, a delicious creature fished around the lake in late spring. Its shores are roamed by flocks of countless white sheep, and a large variety of migrating birds hide in its reeds. High mountains, Artos (3515m), Supan (4058m) and Nemrut (3050m), complete with a chairlift and a

I reluctantly decided to throw in the towel, take the skins oﬀ my skis and start the fun in earnest: skiing 2500 vertical metres in perfect powder. I imagined that perhaps Noah’s sons might have done the same descent (but perhaps not in winter) in the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month – or thereabouts! Once you’ve seen the mountain in winter, it’s hard to imagine Mount Ararat dripping and steaming aﬅer e Flood.

sapphire-blue crater lake, mirror their snowy peaks in the waters of the lake with a certain vanity.

The monastery of Varagavank, seat of archbishops, burial ground of kings, place of learning and one thousand years of worship, is a cowshed now; under its crumbling arches a tractor is parked and where once devout students were studying the scriptures, a cock, a calf and a mangy shepherd dog are slowly making their way over a dung-heap. A village has grown out of the disused walls - shelled to oblivion in 1915. In some of the houses limestone slabs with squiggly, small crosses chiselled on them are all that remains of the vanished cathedral. Animals use the marble stoup as a trough.

ﬂaps and strings of our tent, and threatened to rip the canvas apart. When we were woken by Yildirim, our guide, and zipped the tarpaulin open just an hour aﬅer midnight, snow blanketed our boots and sleeping bags and trickled down our necks. e wind had stopped, and a starry sky, illuminated by a boastully bright Milky Way, lit up the slopes rising above us. In the dark plains 2000 metres below, the town of Dogubeyazit was a host of orange city lights, drawing streets and industrial areas far into the darkness. e Iranian border barracks were lit by bright halogen and neon, and some ancient Persian villages shone like glowing fungus in the hills. We set oﬀ, deliberately slowly, for the last 1700-metre push to the of the other skiers pulled ahead, frustrated by our slowness, and not struggling so much with the ever-thinning air as I was. Yet they were well

We looked out over the velvet-green plains, smooth as the baize of a billiard table, to the jagged crags and rocky jaws south of Dogybeyazit, across to the accordion-folds of rock in the east, and the crumbling basalt and glitering obsidian of the dozing volcanoes along the horizon. And could almost imagine – instead of the biblical high tide - the ear-shatering noise and deafening din of earth’s violent creation. Looking back up the long, steep slopes we had just skied, I felt deeply satisfied with the ornate paterns our turns had leﬅ on those unbelievably long and steep slopes.
It was as if giﬅed children had kneaded them from plasticine. In September 2010, for the first time in nearly a century, a Sunday service was held in this church. Bells rang and the liturgy was chanted in the Armenian language.
Mustafa, our guide, and Schorsch, my travelling companion, sipped Turkish coffee with me as we sat on small stools under blossoming almond trees. e evening sun shone on nameless graves: some erect, others demolished or crumbling away. We looked at the mountains we still wanted to ski, glitering in alluring white. And we talked excitedly about how lucky we had been to climb Ararat in good weather - but we meant in truth how proud we were to have succeeded. e lake changed its blue now, from sapphire to sky-blue, then to turquoise, then silver. When the sun set behind Nemrut (3050m), our small steamer was already sailing close to the shore, on a lake which was a rippled sheet of gold.

summit, a row of two dozen headlights of fellow into retirement age and didn’t look terribly fit. skiers snaking up the slope behind us. Two hours later, dawn unveiled the icy peak of Tendurek (3400m), whose last eruption in 1855 crated the vast and barren lava fields which fill the plains of Agri like crumbly dough.
ey must surely have skied at high altitude some days before today’s mission. It takes at least a couple of days to train a flatlander’s body to cope with the oxygen deprivation of high altitude.
We reached the first 5000m peak some six hours later. On the other side of the summit glacier, a small crest marked the final ascent to 5137 metres. Suddenly a fierce wind sprang up, and clouds raced in from the steep slopes to the north, tearing on clothing and equipment, and instantly deep-freezing my fingers, toes and the tip of my nose. My toes would not defrost properly for many weeks to come…
Only 20 metres below the peak, struggling for breath, with my nose now frozen rock-hard,
Other chains of snow-covered ranges appeared. And when the sun rose in the early hours on the other side of Mount Ararat, its cone-shaped shadow pointed in a perfect pyramid over the plains west-northwest into

The Armenians, who with sadness and stubbornly consider Lake Van their ancient homeland, have terraced this land for 2000 years and cropped it with wine and walnuts, which have all but disappeared. They had festooned the hills

JIMMY GREEN MARINE - BEER

e snow cover of Artos (3515m) had

around the lake with countless chapels,

LANDAU SKI & SPORT - FOLKESTONE LOCKWOODS - LEAMINGTON SPA

melted so quickly during our last few days that we decided to charter a boat to the islands on Lake Van instead. Kush-Adasi island was densely populated by thousands of gulls who defended their nests with noise and rumpus and soiled our sweaters with precision droppings, their furious cackling chater resembling gleeful laughter as they hit their targets. Akdamar island, once the residence of King Gagik I (908-944 AD) and seat of the Catholicos, the head of the Armenian Church for 800 years, boasts a 10th-century cathedral, the only building still intact - a gem of medieval masonry. Built from stern brownstone, the façade is adorned with elaborate and intensely rich reliefs of animals long extinct, garlands of grapes, bands of vines and peacocks, and kings and saints with plump bodies and saucer eyes.

monasteries and churches, which all have been

NEVISPORT - NATIONWIDE

reduced to rubble by time and the atrocities of

NOMAD TRAVELLER STORE - LOUGHTON OUTDOOR GEAR SHOP - HOMEBARN

racial hatred one hundred years ago. Now the

Central Anatolia.

OUTDOOR TRADERS - ABINGDON

Kurds live here and hope for recognition and

PENROSE CAMPING & LEISURE - TRURO

Beyond 4800 metres, some

REYNOLDS OUTDOOR CENTRE - SUNDERLAND

peace.

SAIL & SKI - SHREWSBURY/ CHESTER

On a weekend extended families - women in head scarves, men with octagonal caps and cell phones – would flock to the shores of the lake to do what all Anatolians do on a good day: they spread blankets under willow trees, in the grass near a creek, or on the gravel of the beach, and relish a picnic with barbeque - insects humming and children running noisily about. A cool breeze from the lake will give respite even in the

Epic: Akdamar island’s 10th century cathedral

TAMZARA TRAVEL, director Mustafa Arsin [email protected] +90 544 555 35 82 Yildrim Beyazit OEZTUERK, mountain guide, [email protected]; www.alpinturkey.com Mehmet Kusman, the world’s only ﬂuent interpreter and translator of cuneiform languages; allegedly reads, writes and speaks Urartian, which ceased to be writen aﬅer 585 BC. www.mehmetkusman.com

oppressive heat of summer.