About Us
Climb Kalymnos is a daily resource for climbers to stay informed on a wide range of Kalymnos-related topics. Our goal is to provide accurate, unbiased and up-to-date information on Kalymnos. To this end, your feedback is very important to us – feel free to leave a comment, or email us your questions, thoughts and suggestions.
Climb Kalymnos was founded in 2009 by Aris Theodoropoulos and Katie Roussos combining their passion and work backgrounds. Through their two websites, Climb Greece and Climb Kalymnos, their goal is to offer climbers around the world accessible, easy-to-understand information about a wide range of topics related to climbing in Kalymnos.
Aris and Katie divide their time between their flat in Athens and their home in the shadow of the cliffs in Armeos, Kalymnos.
Aris Theodoropoulos is a Greek mountain guide, climbing instructor, vertical access trainer and full-time Kalymnos activist. He is the author of six previous editions of the Kalymnos guidebook, two editions of a Greece climbing guidebook featuring the country’s best sport climbs, a Varasova climbing guidebook, and two climbing & mountaineering manuals.
As director of the Acharnes Alpine Club’s Climbing & Mountaineering School since 1989, Aris has trained thousands of new climbers in Greece in both trad and sport. He has equipped countless climbing routes all over Greece since the early 1980s, many of which have become classics.
Aris is a consultant to the Hellenic Federation of Mountaineering & Climbing, and he has been PETZL’s official vertical access instructor in Greece for consecutive years; in this capacity he trains, among others, the employees of COSMOTE, the largest mobile phone provider in Greece.
In Kalymnos, Aris devotes much of his time and resources towards organizing and promoting the island’s climbing, developing new routes, and rebolting old ones as needed.
Katie Roussos is a translator, copywriter, copyeditor, and narrator raised in Chicago, Illinois and Athens, Greece. She has co-authored and designed the Leonidio & Kyparissi guidebook (2021), the Kalymnos guidebook (2016, 2019), and the Greece guidebook (2017). She has also translated or written part of the original copy in all previous editions of Aris’s guidebooks from 2010 onwards.
Among other projects, she edits English-language cookbooks, collaborates with design firms to write and edit branding and corporate identity copy, translates hiking maps from Greek to English, lends her voice to English narrations for museum projects, and is the main administrator of Climb Kalymnos and Climb Greece.