The ship docked a little after 6 am. I had slept a few hours but was not feeling rested. We disembarked and found our bus waiting for us. We started the long twisting climb to the Samaria Gorge Trail Head at the crest of the White Mountains . On the way, we stopped at a Taverna for breakfast; I had bought food for lunch in Athens yesterday afternoon.

The trail descends about 2.6 vertical km to the sea over a ~16 km horizontal distance. A quick calculation showed that this descends farther and at a steeper gradient than the Grand Canyon . I suspected it would be rocky; I was right. The hike is stunningly beautiful, descending through a conifer forest with the sides of the gorge towering hundreds of meters above us. The rocks are virtually all limestones of Jurassic to Eocene (?) age. There was surprisingly little structure evident in the upper part of the gorge. In several places we saw thin tuffs interbedded with the limestones.

Since I was destined to be the slowest hiker, I was chosen to lead. The steep slope, loose rocks on the trail, and the constantly increasing number of people queuing up behind me started stressing me out a bit. I knew I would eventually fall if I continued to lead, I had already seen Drew and Aaron Post take tumbles perilously close to steep dropoffs so I stepped aside and waited while a couple of hundred people filed past me. After that, I took it at my own pace letting the others go ahead of me. It was a much more relaxing way to hike and I never fell.

We stopped for lunch in an abandoned medieval village where the gorge widened out and contained stratified mudflow conglomerates. I guessed that they were deposited after an earthquake had caused a rockslide to dam the canyon farther downstream.. My legs were already screaming and stiffened up as we ate. They got a little looser as we started again after lunch. Soon after leaving the village we came to the place where the gorge narrows dramatically. This occurs precisely at the first monoclinal fold. Throughout the narrow lower gorge we saw numerous folds and thrust faults in addition to several other small monoclines. Near the end of the trail within the National Park we crossed a rockslide that probably caused the ponding of a young mudflow not far upstream.

The end of the trail is a couple of kilometers from the beach from which we were taking the 6:00 ferry. It was the easiest part of the hike but my legs wanted to stop with every step. An enterprising entrepreneur could make a fortune offering a shuttle service. I'm sure I wasn't the only person of the thousand or so who made the hike today who would have paid a couple of euros to get to the beach faster. Once we got to town Bob, Anne, and I had a beer on the beach while Drew played in the waves. I noted that the town is built on mudflow deposits, and will probably be pushed into the sea by the next one.

The ferry arrived on time. Most of the several hundred people who boarded looked beat. I had seen many of them on the trail. We had a nice ride along the cliffs on the south side of Crete . We stopped at one small town and then disembarked at the next. Total time on board was about an hour. Our bus met us and we tried to take the coast road to Matala but got behind a slow truck that we couldn't pass. Frustrated, our driver turned and crossed the north side of the island and then took the southern road to Matala. We didn't arrive until 10:30.