Mountain man enjoys his ‘peak’ moment
40 years spent traversing extreme terrain
MANY people in KwaZulu-Natal join the province’s section of the Mountain Club of SA after travelling to the Drakensberg to experience its annual July Camp where seasoned climbers offer them a taste of the mountains.
But Bill Small, the oldest member of the 100-year-old MCSA-KZN Section, did not need to travel to any mountains. As the resident forester at Cobham Forest Station, he was already in them. When the club visited, members impressed him with the way they took only a weekend to summit the Hodgson’s Peaks, which loom above the station. So he signed up.
“We had always climbed it over four days,” recalled Bill, now an active 94 year old still living with Hodgson’s Peaks in view, but now from the village of Underberg.
He celebrated his 80th and 90th birthdays going up the peaks, on the latter occasion with a head start by driving to the top of nearby Sani Pass.
“I have instructed my family to one day scatter my ashes there. And fertilise Cobham,” he told The Independent on Saturday.
Hodgson’s Peaks was also where Bill made one of his greatest mountaineering achievements.
He and his eldest son, Wells, surprised themselves making it up to the Hodgson’s Peaks from Cobham in a day, leaving before daybreak.
They planned to communicate with Bill’s wife and Wells’ mother, the late Alta, using mirrors at noon to show her how far they had got, but her watch was an hour out.
Two mirror flashings, an hour apart, went unanswered in the Drakensberg that day.
But father and son experienced a top-of-the-berg paradise as they waited.
“We followed a stream and went boulder-hopping. There was no path. We passed an iced-up waterfall. The lammergeyers were flying around us.” They made it home at 5pm. There’s hardly anywhere in the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg and its foothills where Bill’s boots have not trodden.
As a schoolboy growing up in Durban, he cycled 170km to Bulwer to climb Bulwer Mountain. After studying at Stellenbosch and at Saasveld in George, where he climbed every mountain in sight, Bill came up with the idea of a long Berg hike.
“One by one my pals dropped out of it but I carried on,” he recalled.
“Professor Sweeney from the University of Natal helped by sending me his map, the first decent map of the berg.
“I started from Royal Natal National Park Hotel, went up Mont-aux-Sources, back down then along the berg up an unknown route and down Mnweni River.”
This was long before fancy hiking equipment came on to the market.
Bill kept himself warm at night between two blankets taped together, wearing Navy trousers from his WWII days and a heavy jersey, lying on the ground.
His rations comprised two tins of condensed milk, a bottle of peanut butter, lots of raw beans, an onion and flour.
“I made bannocks (as flapjacks are called in Bill’s birth country, Scotland), with peanut butter spread on them.
“And jam. I must have carried a jar of jam too!”
Bill’s solo traverse of the berg ended at Cathedral Peak Hotel where two men, sitting on the verandah, asked how much his then-state of the art American Army rucksack weighed.
They popped it on a scale, which showed 92 pounds (41.7kg).
“It must have been more than 100 pounds when I started!”
Many years later, Cathedral Peak became Bill’s final posting with the Department of Forestry, where he was often kept busy managing and carrying out mountain rescues.
“In my first year there, in 12 months there were 13 major incidents.”
Bill’s hope for the MCSA-KZN Section’s next 100 years is that it “just keeps on going”.