80% Climbing Table Mountain

the more times i tried to climb table mountain, the less spectacular and easy it seemed to be. when we tried to take erin and amanda up with us, it proved to be so unbelievably windy that we were quite simply uncomfortable and unhappy much of the time. after making it 75% of the way up, erin was intimidated by the fact that the wind seemed to be getting 1000 times stronger, and plus increasing fog was making it impossible to see to the top. she decided to walk back down, and libby went with her.

amanda and i stubbornly pushed on to the top, and there was some small satisfaction in “making it” the whole way, but that was pretty small indeed.
here we are trying to prove that it’s beautiful at the top (when actually the visibility was next to nothing at all…)

Mama Jean: Conquers Table Mountain

We walked from my house up through city streets till we reached the entrance of the national park. At this point my mom was asking me to check her pulse and telling me her fears of dying.

still, we relaxed a bit in beautiful deer park:

as we got further up, my mom was ready to demonstrate her tremendous strength:

by the time we reached tafelberg, the paved road that leads to the cable car, my mom was so relaxed that she was just whistling and strutting along:

some strange things we found along the way:

i had to have a moment of glory, too:

“Here we have met a Father and Son while walking on the top of Table Mountain. The Father had been born in Capetown, and they now live near the Silver Spring/Takoma Park border in Maryland, exactly where my brother Tiger lives. What a small world. The Father was saying he had not been to South Africa for 50 years, but you have to admit “South Africa has everything”. He was holding a salamander which he caught, so we took a picture of it, and them.”

our last overlook on the way down:

Budapest Calling: Craziest Table Mountain Climb Ever!

There were many reasons why the climb of table mountain that evi and i planned was crazy. You might say, with hindsight, that our climb was destined to lead in the insane direction that it led. Maybe. We certainly decided to take the “maximum risk” route, and we got a rush of exhileration out of that, and also paid a steep price.

First off, we didn’t leave our house to start the climb until about 2:30 in the afternoon, and with the climb being 1.5 hours (at least) each way, and the sun setting around 6:30, we were really pushing the limits of possibilities. Then, we had to get some things to help protect evi’s blistered ankles against hurting horribly from the four hours of hiking. Doing that meant that we didn’t make it to the start of the trail till 3:30.

Aware of the time constraints facing us, we decided to take the path that leads towards Devil’s Peak – and not the recommended route up to the top of tabel mountain – because, as i’ve said before, we were looking for “maximum risk,” an adventure, if you will. We had looked on the map, and it seemed like it might be possible to turn off of the Devil’s Peak path at some point, onto a new trail up to the top of table mountain. As we started climbing, we met a man coming down and asked him about this idea. He assured us that it would work and that (and here’s the for sure “quote of the day”) “it’s really well signposted up there,” so we’d surely find our way without any difficulty. Furthermore, being reasonable for a moment, we told ourselves that if we just climbed up Devil’s Peak and back down the same path, that wouldn’t really be so bad.

After an hour of climbing we were near what they call the “saddle,” a piece of rocky earth that bends down, inbetween Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain. As the clouds were covering the whole sky and down to us, so we were literally “in the clouds,” we tried to decide whether to keep going up to Devil’s Peak, or to try and turn off towards the top of Table Mountain.

Convinced that we could see a clear path up Table Mountain, we decided to turn away from Devil’s Peak and head again towards “maximum risk.” If we could make it to the top in a little while, we could still walk down the “recommended route” down into the setting sun. Not a totally crazy idea, eh?

I guess the reality of our insanity didn’t really sink in until we reached, for the first time, an actual sign:

From that point on, things got really quite crazy. First we got crazy happy. The clouds cleared as we stood on the saddle, and it was wonderful to see the city centre and the suburbs spread out beneath the mountain on the other side, all at once. We were convinced that we had definitely made the right choice, doing the more interesting, fun and beautiful thing.

As the maybe-a-path turned into clearly-not-a-path, first gradually and then radically, we started to feel a little different. For a while there was an adrenaline rush, making us think that we could scramble our way to the top and triumph in an amazing way. There kept being little piles of rocks as we went along, that looked intentional and gave us the idea that even though we were scrambling we were clearly headed in a possible direction towards the top. Then, as it neared 6:00, we realized that we were increasingly having to turn back around and try again, increasingly looking up at shear rock and looking down at sharp cliff edges, prickly bush and unstable footing, etc. In another flash of reasonable behavior, we decided to “start heading down.” Brilliant.

We decided not to head straight down, as in backwards, because our last half an hour up had been so harsh and steep. So, we kept going, scrambling all the way, around the mountain. We thought we’d walk along the mountain and downwards, till we reached a viable path. As it turned out, we didn’t reach any clear path (the “recommended route”) until 9:00 – three hours later! Those three hours were some of the scariest, gruelling, tiring – and therefore fully alive – hours of my life. Each of us reached multiple periods of full panic. Luckily Evi’s panic mode frequently made her want to keep charging ahead (only once did her panic tell her to sit down and smoke a cigarette!) whereas my panicked mind kept telling me to totally stop moving my body, to give up. But our moments of panic and hope luckily alternated, so we were able to keep each other calm, hopeful and focused, each taking turns leading the way down.

As the last bits of sunlight gave way to darkness we found ourselves walking and sliding and crawling through bushes, shrubs, rocks, trees and mountain streams in the shadow of the moonlight shining down onto the mountain. Our standards for what was a safe place to place our hands or our feet steadily declined, till we were almost always sliding on our asses, almost always stepping onto things that couldn’t hold our weight for very long, and many of the things we couldn’t even really see that clearly.

Around 8:00 or 8:30 I started to get totally fed up with the whole process. The initial fear-driven hope-adrenaline was all gone, and I was just weary. I began screaming songs at the top of my lungs, and demanding that we walk further across the mountain (and no longer down into the ravine, which was anyway increasingly a stream and we were increasingly wet and cold) to reach a path and be done, once and for all, with this insane scrambling. This “strike” mode led me, at one point, to the moment that was closest to dying that I’ve ever experienced. I ended up standing in and on a waterfall, with water sliding past my feet and arm, standing on a thin piece of wet rock, and my body just totally froze. There was still a few more feet of waterfall to walk through, and i couldn’t conceive of doing it. I was just stuck there, screaming for evi to help me somehow, screaming out my terror, and eva tried to encourage me to turn around, but i just couldn’t. i literally thought to myself that the easiest thing to do would be to just let go of the rock and let myself fall. the whole moment probably lasted about 45 seconds, and then i somehow unfroze and walked across the waterfall to dry land. Normally my emtions feel so cloudy and confusing, but in that moment (and others on this long scramble down) i felt no ambiguity at all, just the pure beauty of fear!

When we finally reached the path we were totally ecstatic. We ate snacks and sang songs and laughed and began marvelling at the feat that we had just accomplished. We had scaled more than a kilometer and a half of a huge mountain, mostly when we were at least 800m up, and then climbed a good 500m of that down through a ravine, with no path, in the dark. Once it was over, it could be funny again, a miraculous, adventurous “success” of some sort.

Furthermore, we had the good luck of doing this whole crazy thing on a night when the moon was full AND being eclipsed by the sun, exactly at the point that we reached the path. Many people had driven up to the roadway along the bottom of table mountain’s path in order to see the eclipse, and there we were, joining them, to see the beautiful sight.

We drove down the hill to the wonderful biesmallah restaurant in bo-kaap, wet and ragged and exhausted, and feasted on curry and sweet drinks – and evi snuck out (and brought me along sometimes) of the restaurant a half dozen times to keep catching glimpses of the eclispsed moon.

It was really a beautiful ending to a totally crazy adventure…

Paul’s First Time up Table Mountain

my friend paul moved in with me during the xenophobic attacks in late may, as his apartment that he shared with 9 other people from various countries in africa became totally overcrowded with ‘foreigners’ from the townships seeking refuge downtown. we lived together until early august, and had lots of fun times, learning to accommodate each other in our different world-views and lifestyles (i listened to more bob marley than ever in my life, as this was our main agreement in terms of music); and his excellent skills in chess hopefully rubbed off on me a bit. towards the end of his time living together, me and some friends took him up table mountain for the first time in his life. it was a great climb, up the ‘maximum risk’ route which winds directly under the cable car and requires a good bit of scrambling.

here’s paul at home:

and here’s our day climbing (with jan, jan’s friend karl, and daniel):