CRACKING THE CODE
‘Are we in a crack yet?”
“Nope, just between a rock and a hard place.”
Hiking with a die-hard joker is a thing. Climbing with a bunch of seasoned mountain junkies is a whole new lexicon.
So there we were, scrambling up a precipitous geological wonder in the heart of the spectacularly sculpted Cederberg, and the only word that really sprang to mind was “help”. But a “crack”, I discovered, turns out to be a sort of gap between two huge wedges of mountain.
In the case of the Wolfberg Cracks, there are two, clearly, a Wide one and a Narrow one.
Mercifully it was decided to give the Narrow one, featuring chockstones, dark passages, rope rungs, exposed ledges and squeeze holes, a miss. So we were negotiating the last stages of the Wide one, when I recalled a notice at the start that said, “No bolting”. Not much chance of that, I thought, tackling a pile of craggy boulders several times my height. On enquiry, it turned out drilling bolts is for the purposes of attaching carabiners.
This wasn’t the moment to be scrolling through Google — and anyway, there’s not a whole lot of signal in amongst solid Table Mountain sandstone – so I made a note to ask more later. But bolt drilling, or even carrot-bolt (don’t even ask) drilling can cause rock damage. And whilst the monumental Cederberg ranges have been settled for centuries, no one would want to tempt providence by doing anything that could result in rock falls. These things go through your mind at great heights – or should I say elevation gain?
Over the few days of exploring this extraordinary terrain, conversation was peppered with gats and gulleys, saddles and screes, riffs, cairns and — my best — “moraines”. WTF, I thought, never mind what it means — how do you even spell it?
“Oh it’s just a jumble of rocks,” explained the chief rock-hopper. Just to be clear – in case you should ever come across it in a crossword, or need it for Scrabble, it is technically “a mass of rocks and sediments carried down by a glacier typically as ridges at its edges or extremity”.
Lord knows how generations of San located their whereabouts here – maybe “turn left at the rock that looks like a rhino, cupcake, camel”. No wait, I’m sure intuition would have worked better than words, come to think of it.
But back at the Wide Crack, as we made our way up, we encountered a brace of Brits with their six- and nine-year-olds on their way down. As recommended in the guide books, they had indeed gone up the Narrow Crack, squeeze holes and all, and were busy skipping down the Wide one like a family of dassies. Just moments earlier at what I considered to be an especially tricky stretch, a fellow wuss in front of me had muttered, “Actually, I don’t think I can do this”.
“I’m with you,” I said – and had it not been for dignity retention in the face of the Dassie Family, I think we might both have turned and, um, bolted.
But, eventually, we emerged from the Wide Crack, blinking in the light onto a flat moonscape surface with a 360-degree view that defies description. Worth every overstretched muscle, grazed knee and bruised buttock.
“Look,” said rock-hopper-in-chief, pointing far, too far in the distance, “there’s the Wolfberg Arch!”
Now there’s a word I could both recognise and identify.