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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Technicolor Darkness
In the red-rock high ground of South Africa, climbing still comes down to black and white. Greg Child goes on belay to explore the crags, boulder gardens, and post-Apartheid complications of the world's next climbing mecca.

By Greg Child


	The new generation. 25-year-old climbing instructor Thulani Mazibuko on the cliffs at Waterval Boven (Jimmy Chin)

There is at least one good reason to go climbing in South Africa, and that's the stone. The geologic forces that turn coal into diamonds have morphed primeval sands into glassy red quartzite reefs that erupt across the country, offering hundreds of world-class climbing areas—from the remote cliffs of Blouberg and bouldering routes in the Cederberg Mountains north of Cape Town to a massive upsurge that looms over the city itself.

Just north of the Cape of Good Hope, a stiff southeaster rips over the summit of Table Mountain, blowing tendrils of fog toward Cape Town's sunbather-dotted beaches, 3,000 feet below. I'm halfway up a 5.10 route called Triple Indirect, perched on a ledge in the lee of the wind, as my friend Ed February leads the last pitch. Ed is a local and, as one of the country's most famous climbers, a regular on this crag. Even at 48, his physique is as honed as a featherweight boxer's. When he shouts that he's off belay, I clamp my fingers over edges of white stone

Where the Crag Are We?

click here to view a map of South Africa's climbing spots.

as solid as kiln-hardened porcelain. The exposure below my toeholds is dizzying. I can see Table Bay, where Dutch ships anchored in 1652 to found Cape Town. Six miles out to sea lies Robben Island, the prison compound where Nelson Mandela was jailed for 27 years. White suburbs hug the coastline, while the black townships of Guguletu and Khayelitsha are a fringe of smoke over the flats.

I pull up and find Ed near the cable-car station at the summit. Though he's climbed this cliff—a 400-foot quartzite sheet—a score of times, he beams as we coil our ropes. Table Mountain is where South African climbing began, and Ed points along its fortresslike ridge to a distant headwall. "First climbed in 1895," he says. I try to picture the Victorians who scaled this monolith with hemp ropes back when the motto was "The leader never falls." And then I try to imagine how Ed could identify with them.

Only a decade ago, Ed wasn't allowed on many routes in his home country. Under apartheid—the system of racial separation codified by the white Afrikaner minority in 1948—even the outdoors was segregated. And Edmund C. February, doctor of botany, university lecturer, and recipient of the Gold Badge, the highest honor of the elite Mountain Club of South Africa, is black.

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