Anyone hike Lycian Way?

BPL member Amy Lauterbach has done it and it is posted on her fantastic blog DOING MILES although her trip was done in April and not January she has a lot of great info.

<p style=”text-align: left;”>I’ve done a lot it over the last year, not the higher sections to the East, as there was too much snow.</p>
I’m doing some hiking in Turkey now.

Have friends who live in Kas and walk over the winter months too (I think they read BPL so might be along).

My wife and I are both just back from a short coastal section of the Lycian Way. We have been Turkey residents for 30+ years. We backpack here in January, but we’re fair-weather hikers and choose our weather windows to maximise the sun and minimise the rain.

Not knowing your hiking style, I can’t be too specific, so the following is just some general information.

January is (unsurprisingly) the worst month for weather on the coast here. It can be cold and damp, sometimes for prolonged spells. Storms can be torrential and localised winds can be fierce. That said, days of showers are more common than whole days of prolonged rain. You can also get beautiful, warm, sunny periods. And this December has been unseasonably warm and sunny, so who knows what this January will bring.

And as EdH says, there’s the snow to consider. Distant views of the mountains suggest that the snow starts at around 2,000m at the moment (on the southern slopes), and precipitation has been low so far, so I’m pretty confident that it doesn’t yet cause a problem, even on the higher sections. But a week of cold, wet weather could quickly change that.

Of course, if you’re not through hiking, you could choose to skip the three highest section, and one of them – Tahtalı Dağ  – has a lower alternative anyway. (Last January, we had snow down to 400m, and there was enough of it at 800m to slow progress. But that was highly unusual, and the snow was soon gone from the lower elevations.)

Temperatures close to the sea are relatively mild, but even at altitudes of a few hundred metres frost is usual on clear nights, so be prepared for nighttime lows below freezing away from the coast.

One final thing, the Demre-Finike section has few water sources, and you will almost certainly need to access water from cisterns. This autumn has been very dry and I would expect the majority of the cisterns to have poor quality water. It’s several years since we hiked that section, but EdH hiked it in March this year, I think, and wasn’t too impressed with water quality.