Quathlamba
“A
mass of Spears. Named thus by the Zulu warriors before the white man came.
Today called the Drakensberg, Mountains of the Dragon, a name given by the
Voortrekkers. Evocative names, both equally applicable to South Africa’s
mightiest mountain range with its spear-like peaks – reminiscent of the
saw-toothed spine of a gigantic dragon.”
Panorama April 1966This blog is all about the Drakensberg Mountains and its Wilderness area, South Africa. I have lost my heart and soul to this area and every single time I hike these mountains, I stand in awe all over again at this magnificent beauty.
"How often in the course of our travels through Kwazulu-Natal do we stop and gaze at the beauty of a distant range of mountains? The Drakensberg stands as a monument to one of the greatest cataclysms the Earth has experienced. As you approach the mountains, you realize why early Zulus called it "Quathlamba", meaning “Barrier of Up-pointed Spears". A cradle of rivers. Listen to the streams as they gurgle from their cradles and you will hear the story of the mountains. You will hear fascinating tales if only you listen! Lie next to a stream and listen to the song of the mountains. The smiling faces of the flowers, dancing in the wind. Venture into the remote valleys or stand on a peak at sunrise or sunset, after snow has fallen, and you will hear a song that you will never forget - the Song of the High Mountain". (DA Dodds)
Hiking adventures, hiking gear reviews, day walks, accommodation, books, articles and photos, all related to these magnificent mountains will feature here.
Should you want to accompany me on a hike or need some information or advice, please make contact with me. I hope you enjoy the articles.
Please visit the archive for some more interesting stories, photos and reviews.
Available in the Archive
(Do read it!)
1) Injasuthi to Lotheni
- Epic 6 Day Hike
2) Review: Hi-Tec
Altitude Pro RGS Hiking Boots
3) Drakensberg
Wilderness Hiking - 14 Day Hiking trip - Lotheni Reserve (Part 3)
4) Lotheni - 14 Day
Hiking Trip (Part 2)
5) Lotheni - 14 Day
Hiking Trip (Part 3)
6) The Bushmen of the
Drakensberg
7) Thunderstorms in the
Drakensberg Mountains
8) Before setting out on a hike………..
9) Cathkin Peak – Drakensberg
10) Why backpack and
multi-day hiking
11) Safety in the
Drakensberg
12) In the Shadow of
Cathedral Peak
13) Injasuthi – ‘well
fed dog’
14) Lotheni Reserve
15) Garmin eTrex 10
& 20 Specs and Review
16) The birth of the
Drakensberg – The Ancient Rocks
17) Drakensberg
Mountains – Rock Art
18) Drakensberg
Mountain Reserve Accommodation
19)
Drakensberg – Mkhomazi Area – Hikers Paradise
20)
Drakensberg – Hiking Kamberg – Highmoor - Kamberg, Exploring the Mooi
River Valleys
21)
Chelmsford Nature Reserve
22)
Bushmen Art – Deep in a Mooi River Valley
23)
Missing in the Drakensberg Mountains – Dragon’s Wrath
Photos please make contact with the author, Willem Pelser.
“IT IS THE NATURE OF MAN TO
JOURNEY WHERE THERE IS HOPE OF GREAT DANGER”
From a medieval Norse MS, “The King’s
Mirror”
MISSING IN THE
DRAKENSBERG MOUNTAINS – DRAGONS WRATH
THE SHIP’S PROW PASS
DISASTER
In newspaper parlance, a news story
that develops over a period of days or weeks is a “running story”. An
investigation of one of these running stories as it built up from edition to
edition in the daily and weekly newspapers, and in tribute to the reporters who
gathered and sifted facts for their readers, we find that there is no new
evidence to add, and only very little comment to make, on the stories they
wrote during the fateful three days of 10 to 13 January 1981.
The story of disaster as told through
various news reports. There is some repetition, but it recreates the feeling of
living from edition to edition – morning to evening to morning…….. that feeling
of waiting, hoping, praying.
Daily News, Saturday, 10 January 1981:
HUNT FOR BERG HIKERS
HIT BY MIST AND RAIN
Fears for the lives of three mountain
hikers, missing for 11 days, are growing. Rescue attempts have been severely
hampered by heavy mist and light rain in the Monk’s Cowl area of the
Drakensberg.
Dr Sherman Ripley, leader of the
nine-man volunteer Mountain Club team which has been in the area since
yesterday morning, said today they were completely bogged down by the mist and
rain.
Three Air Force helicopters from Durban are
standing by with the rescue team waiting for the weather to clear.
“We
are getting worried because this weather shows no sign of lifting. They could
be anywhere and probably out of food by now unless they ended up in Lesotho –
where their chances are still slim,” said Dr Ripley.
The hikers – two brothers from Steynsrus
in the Free State, and a girl friend from Pretoria (names omitted in order not to open old wounds – W Pelser), left the
Monk’s Cowl Forest Station at 7 am on 31 December and were due back on 4
January.
Dr Ripley said the hikers could be almost anywhere because they
had failed to record accurate details of their proposed hike.
“We are really in the dark at the moment.
This morning we sent out a three-man party to look in an obvious area, but
that’s the safest shot in the dark we can take at the moment,” said Dr Ripley.
The helicopters flew along the lower
slopes of the mountain yesterday but were unable to reach the mist-shrouded
mountain tops. The father of the brothers travelled to the Drakensberg
yesterday and is anxiously awaiting news of his sons.
The eldest brother is a teacher in
Welkom. His younger brother has just finished his army training and intends
going to university next year.
Dr Sherman Ripley,
leader of the Mountain Club’s Search and Rescue team at the time, discusses
strategy with a group of SAAF pilots.
Sunday Times, Sunday 11 January 1981:
DRAMA ON THE BERG: RACE
TO FIND HIKERS
Hope is fading fast for the three hikers
missing in the Drakensberg for six days.
The party was expected home on Tuesday and when they had not
returned on Thursday, the girl’s brother phoned the Winterton Police and raised
the alarm.
They were last seen by two other hikers
halfway up Gray’s Pass, which leads to the escarpment, several days ago.
It was thought that the party may have lost its way across the
border into Lesotho, but checks with the authorities in that country have drawn
a blank.
Several rescue teams yesterday scoured other
areas.
A member of one team said that visibility was down to 50 m in
places and that it was cold inside the cloud.
Rain on the Drakensberg put a stop to the
search yesterday afternoon.
The mountain rescue team, led by Dr
Ripley, is reported to have gone as far up the escarpment as Gray’s Pass but
had to return to base when the rain set in again.
Dr Ripley described the situation as “pretty desperate”.
At Monk’s Cowl Forest Station, which has been turned into an
emergency operation center, several family members of the missing hikers are
waiting anxiously for news.
The father of the men said “The rescue people have warned me to
expect the worst and I know the chances are not good”.
He said his one son was not keen to go on the hike and “that
makes it worse if he is dead. But whatever happens I will accept it as God’s
will”.
Unbelievable destruction! The stream below Sip’s Prow Pass
where the bodies were found is a horrifying jumble of rocks, debris and smashed
trees. In the white circle is one of the bodies.
Sunday Tribune, 11 January 1981:
BERG SEARCHERS FEAR
HIKERS DEAD
Three young hikers missing for a week in
the Monk’s Cowl area of the Drakensberg are now feared dead, but the search
continued at first light today.
Three Air Force helicopters airlifted a
mountain rescue team into the upper Berg to comb gorges where it is thought the
hikers may have got lost or been injured.
But hopes for the three dwindled
yesterday when the helicopters were grounded by mist and darkness after nearly
two full days of search, in which they covered an area of 200 square
kilometers.
And at the Forest Station at Monk’s
Cowl, base camp for the rescuers, questions were being asked about why there
had been a four-day delay before the search began.
The missing hikers set off towards
Cathkin Peak on 31 December, saying they would be back by Sunday, 4 January.
The search did not get under way until
Thursday this week.
By this time the hiker’s food, light and heating would almost
certainly have run out. They are thought to have carried supplies for no more
than five days. Their car was left at the forestry station campsite and was
found to contain no money and clothing.
The three walked up Gray’s Pass – one of
the few routes through the precipitous cliff face behind Cathkin Peak – and
were seen there by another party of hikers on New Year’s Day. That was the last
time anyone saw them.
Dr Ripley said yesterday there was little hope for the three
unless they had left the mountain by another route.
The father of the two brothers said his
sons were resourceful and level-headed, but did not know the Drakensberg. Only
the girl had hiked there before.
Mountaineers said the plateau behind Cathkin Peak
was filled with deep valleys where it was easy to get lost, even for someone
who knew the Berg.
Natal Mercury, 12 January 1981:
BERG TRIO DEAD
WALL OF WATER SWEPT
HIKERS DOW GULLY
Cathkin Peak. The battered bodies of three
hikers were recovered from a gully in the Drakensberg yesterday after an
intensive search by helicopters and a mountain rescue team.
The hikers had been swept to their
deaths by a wall of water which had roared down a narrow gully ripping through
their tent and leaving their belongings scattered for more than a kilometer
along the mountainside near there.
Rescue workers, who were dropped at the
spot by three helicopters, worked for more than three hours to free the bodies
from the boulder strewn bed of the gully.
The force of the water, thought to have
been fed by a fierce storm on 2 January, had ripped the clothing from the
hikers and battered their bodies beyond recognition.
“The water hit so hard that it picked up a
huge boulder and tossed it into the branches of a tree,” one of the rescue
workers said yesterday.
“They didn’t have a chance. It probably
happened so fast they never even knew what was happening.”
The missing trio was found, three days
after the aerial search had begun, when a pilot spotted a haversack lying near
a gully in Ship’s Prow Pass.
A team of volunteers from the Mountain Club was dropped to
scour the area and made the gruesome discovery about 30 minutes later.
The three hikers had left Monk’s Cowl
area on 31 December with the intention of returning to the Forest Station there
on 4 January. By the time the alarm was raised, all three had probably been
dead for five days.
Mist, rain and hail hampered the Air
Force search for hours at a time and helicopters, blinded by mist, actually
overflew the scene of the tragedy several times before finding the bodies.
The three helicopters scoured a 250
square kilometer area so thoroughly that they stopped to retrieve pieces of
refuse and discarded bottles in the hope that the hikers may have scrawled a
message for help.
The brothers were on their first visit to the Drakensberg.
“What makes
it even more tragic is the fact that the one brother did not want to come in
the first place,” said his father, but we persuaded him to go.
The families had spent 60 anxious hours
at Monk’s Cowl before a Winterton policeman broke the news of their children’s
death.
The bodies were flown from the gully to
the Winterton Police Station.
A Natal Parks Board spokesman said the accident was the worst
of its kind in the Drakensberg.
When the storm hit on the 2 January it
washed out the road to Injasuthi Resort and nearly swept away a family who were
camping there, he said.
Ship’s Prow Pass after
a heavy snowfall. The party would have descended the left-hand fork.
Daily News, Monday, 12 January 1981:
DIARY OF HORROR IN THE
VALLEY OF DEATH
The Ship’s Prow Pass is a steep-sided
valley running up the side of the Drakensberg between Injasuthi and the
Champagne Castle Peak above.
During the past 10 days the area has been
subjected alternately to fierce storms and thick mist.
Thirteen days ago a party of three hikers
arrived in the Cathkin Peak area to spend five days walking in the mountains.
Only one of the parties had been in the
mountains before.
On Old Year’s Day they parked their car
at the Monk’s Cowl Forest Station, noted their intention to walk up Cathkin
Peak to return by 4 January, and set off up Gray’s Pass into the Drakensberg.
They saw in the New Year in the popular
Nkosezana cave on the trail, where they told another hiker they planned to walk
along the plateau to Champagne Castle, then down Ship’s Prow Pass to the path
which led back to their car.
The next day they met another group and
told them the same story. They were never seen alive again.
The alarm was first raised by the girl’s
brother who realized something was wrong when his sister did not return to
Pretoria by Tuesday to resume her classes.
He told the Police. By Thursday a nine-man Mountain Club team
had formed. The Air Force and rescue team gathered on Friday, using the Monk’s
Cowl Forest Station as their base. By mid-morning they had scoured the lower
reaches of the mountains but were forced to call off the search above 3000 m
while dense mist persisted.
On Sunday the cloud lifted, enabling the helicopters to get
above the mist to search the plateau, only to report o success to the group of
relatives of the missing trio and a growing contingent from the Press.
Yesterday dawned bright and clear. The three helicopters rose
with the dawn to check the remaining mountain reaches. They also flew 20 km
into neighboring Lesotho, checked refuse on the mountain trails and interviewed
hut dwellers.
They reported nothing but some hail along
the edges and an air temperature on the top of five degrees.
At mid-morning the searchers decided to re-examine the hiker’s
most likely trail before moving the base of the search further south.
In particular the Ship’s Prow Pass had been examined only
through binoculars as air currents made flying treacherous.
When they managed to enter the valley they
were horrified by the devastation they found – “the worst I have ever seen” as
more than one seasoned climber described it.
Trees had been torn out and boulders
thrown about like marbles.
They also found the first traces of the missing hikers.
It did not take long to discover the bodies. Two were seen
almost immediately, and the third, glimpsed from the air, was located by a Daily News reporter an hour later.
There seems to be little chance of being
sure exactly what happened. But the three had obviously been dead for some days
and the devastation around them told its own tale.
Many members of the rescue team felt they
had been caught in a flash flood while picking their way down the pass in a
heavy downpour.
The vast mountain walls would have fed
enormous amounts of water into the stream in the space of a few minutes,
filling all the pools and gullies to capacity.
Somewhere high on the pass a rock would have
slipped, releasing a tiny dam of water into the next pool and knocking out the
retaining rock.
In a few seconds a wall of water, tossing boulders ahead of it,
tearing out and shredding full grown trees to matchwood, would have scoured the
place from top to bottom.
The hikers stood no chance. They were found, partly buried under
debris, with a distance between them of 150 m, while scraps of their shredded
belongings appeared over as much as a kilometer.
Natal Witness, 12 January 1981:
BERG TRAGEDY
FLASH FLOOD KILLED THREE
HIKERS
The bodies of the three hikers missing
in the Champagne Castle area of the Drakensberg were discovered yesterday by
Air Force helicopters and members of the Mountain Club rescue team.
The three hikers were apparently on
their way down Ship’s Prow Pass from the top of the escarpment when they were
overpowered by a flash flood and either drowned or were battered to death on
boulders and scree.
Their bodies were flown from the scene of
the tragedy to Winterton late yesterday.
The leader of the rescue team said the
bodies of the hikers were found after one of the helicopters reported sighting
debris floating in a stream about a kilometer from a rest camp named Injasuthi.
Although it is believed that the three were drowned while
trying to cross a stream, a member of the rescue team said that he thought the
party might have been camping by the stream when the flash flood struck.
“Over an
extensive area we found pieces of tent, open sleeping bags and rucksacks,” he
said. “In one place I saw a large boulder lodged in the branches of a tree at
least a meter from the ground.”
Flooding ten days ago in the stream at
Injasuthi – which has its source at the head of Ship’s Prow Pass – suggests
that the three young people died on Friday, 2 January.
Natal Mercury, 13 January 1981:
NEW THEORY ON BERG
DEATH HIKE TRIO
Three hikers swept to their death in a
Drakensberg gully were probably overcome by a flooded stream as they attempted
a crossing.
This was the theory offered yesterday by Dr Sherman Ripley,
rescue convener of the Mountain Club.
It was likely that the hikers had no idea that a flooded
mountain stream could become a “torrential grinding machine” in which boulders
were thrown around, said Dr Ripley.
He said he did not believe that the two brothers and the girl
had been hit by a wall of water fed by high-altitude streams. “I believe they
were trying to cross the already flooded stream on their way back to the
forestry camp at Monk’s Cowl when they were swept away,” he said.
“I think that a lack of knowledge tempted
them to cross the stream. They were probably a few hours late and decided to
cross before the stream became a heavy flood. They probably had no idea that a
flooded boulder stream is so dangerous. It is a torrential grinding machine,”
he said.
Dr Ripley said that the sketchy plan of
the intended route supplied by the trio at the forestry camp had also
complicated search operations by three helicopters and a nine-man rescue team.
The meager outline of their route merely
said they intended walking up to Cathkin Peak.
“We knew it was wrong as the last 300 m of
Cathkin Peak is vertical. But they had no idea where they were.”
The eventual possible route of the three
was discovered after people who had met them on their ill-fated hike told the
Mountain Club of the trio’s plans.
“If people go into an environment that can
be dangerous they should be sufficient knowledgeable and give more details of
their intentions when they fill in the forms,” he said.
Dr Ripley said he was against legal obligations being imposed
on people who chose to go hiking and climbing in the mountains.
THERE is not much to add to this grim story. A few days later we
spoke to the District Surgeon who had done the post-mortem examinations. He
told us they were the most horrifying he had ever done. The two men were quite
unidentifiable. Bill Barnes, of the Parks Board, said it looked as if the
bodies had been through a mincing machine.
How they died we shall never know. Were they still descending
the pass when the wall of water and tumbling boulders came roaring down upon
them? Were they trying to cross the stream to the contour path? Or had they
camped for the night, and in their sleep knew not what had struck them? We do
not know.
Never, under any circumstances, make camp beside a Drakensberg Mountain
stream, no matter how small it is. If you have to cross a flooded stream, use a
rope, with two of the party keeping a tight hold on it from the bank. The
terrain in the Drakensberg is so steep that a placid stream can become a
thundering torrent in a few minutes, and if you miss your footing in it, hope
dies.
In 1976 the Sterkspruit broke its banks
and came roaring down the quiet valley. A Forestry game guard, trying to cross
just above the Sterkspruit Falls, lost his footing and was swept over the falls
to his death. In 1975 a Transvaal school boy tried to cross the flooded
Umlambonja River in the Cathedral area. He lost his footing, and he too was
drowned in the raging waters.
Among the many joys of the Drakensberg are
the mountain streams, chuckling and brawling in the sunlight over the pewter
grey stones, their song a madrigal of quiet contentment and joy. But when a
cloudburst strikes like a clenched fist, they become vicious and relentless
killers. Watch them!
The End.
Acknowledgements
Story and B/W Photos from the book “Dragon’s Wrath” – James Byron/R O
Pearse
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