On August 2, 1913, 113 years ago today, three men stood on the summit of Mount Olympus for the first time in recorded hi...

On August 2, 1913, 113 years ago today, three men stood on the summit of Mount Olympus for the first time in recorded history. Two Swiss climbers, Fred Boissonnas and Daniel Baud-Bovy, made the ascent alongside a local hunter from the region named Christos Kakalos. The peak they reached, called Mytikas, sits at 2,918 meters and had never been officially summited before. The climb nearly didn't happen. The trio set out on July 29, reached a vantage point where they could see Mytikas on July 30, then turned back because night was falling. They changed their minds the next day and pushed on through a storm, spending the night of August 1st in a hut at Mavrologgos. At dawn on August 2nd they pushed for the summit through heavy fog. At 9 a.m. they reached what they believed was the highest point and planted a Swiss flag there, naming the spot "Victory Peak" in honor of the Greek army's win at the Battle of Sarantaporos the previous October. Then the fog lifted and they realized the real summit was still above them. It was Kakalos who pushed them forward, scrambling the final stretch to the true summit barefoot. They reached the top of Mytikas at 10:25 a.m. Boissonnas was a well-known Geneva-based photographer who went on to document early 20th-century Greece in a collection of 7,000 photographs. Baud-Bovy was a poet and painter. Worth noting: until October 1912, most of Mount Olympus, including Mytikas, was still Ottoman territory. The first ascent came less than a year after Greece reclaimed it. Kakalos kept guiding climbers up Olympus until 1972. A mountain refuge at 2,660 meters now bears his name. #Greece #MountOlympus #GreekHistory