Saklıkent Gorge is an eighteen-kilometre fissure in the Taurus of southwestern Türkiye, walls close to 300 metres high narrowing to about two metres near the top, and the stream on its floor never fell into it. Rain and snow landing on Akdağ sink into the limestone, cross the massif somewhere underground, and come back out at the bottom of the gorge through cracks in the rock. You meet that water the moment the walkway ends. A boardwalk pinned to the cliff carries you in from the mouth, and where it stops there are six to eight metres of fast, thigh-deep current to cross on a rope. Cold enough to sting your legs, and plenty of people turn back right there. Past it the gorge calms.
Four kilometres of wading and scrambling lead up a corridor of grey and pink limestone, worn smooth and scooped into hollows by water and grit, the sky a strip a long way overhead. Where the current slackens, fine grey clay settles in the shallows. People scoop it up, plaster it on, let it dry pale and tight in the canyon air, then rinse it off in water cold enough to make everyone shout. Not all of this was cut from above. In places the water ran through karst tunnels inside the limestone, and the gorge only opened where their roofs collapsed. That is why the walls stand so close to vertical. At the mouth, low wooden platforms sit directly over the running water, and you eat charcoal-grilled trout cross-legged above the current. The ridge above the valley carries Tlos, a Lycian city with its tombs cut into the cliff face, and every wide stretch down here was built on at some point. The slot was the one place too narrow and too wet to hold a settlement. Four kilometres is also where walkers stop. The other fourteen belong to roped teams in wetsuits and helmets, abseiling the drops and sliding the chutes — the far larger half of Saklıkent, and the half almost nobody sees.