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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Technicolor Darkness (cont.)


	Rock country: the author, in the foreground, and Ed February rope up on Touch and Go, a route on Cape Town's Table Mountain (Jimmy Chin)

UNTIL 1994, WHEN APARTHEID was dismantled, the politically correct way to respond to an invitation to climb in South Africa was to politely decline. Throughout the years of the struggle—from the first state of emergency, in 1960, to Mandela's release, in 1990, and election as president, in 1994—South Africa was coming apart at the seams. The whole world could see it on the nightly news: an endless video loop of burning townships, white cops in riot gear shooting tear gas and bullets, black protesters returning fire with stones and the occasional AK-47.

Paradoxically, the violence masked a vibrant period of discovery in the South African backcountry. Denied permits to climb in Nepal, Pakistan, India, and most anywhere else because of their government's racist policies, rock hounds explored their own backyard, extracting first ascents from its unexplored cliffs. Climbers filled the guidebooks with new routes, creating a tightly knit fraternity as fond of beer and practical jokes as any clan of crag rats, except that they happened to be pushing the levels of difficulty into the ether of 5.13. Most were white: There were Dave Cheesemond and Greg Lacey, Cape Town pioneers who both died in mountaineering accidents—in the Yukon and Chamonix, respectively—in the eighties. Martin "Tinie" Versfeld, now 45, the son of famed Afrikaner philosopher and poet Martinus Versfeld, and a climber with a hawk's eye for new routes. And finally Andy de Klerk, 37, for two decades the country's top climber, thanks to stiff 5.13 ascents at home and solo climbs of the Alps' north faces. In 2000, after hearing about these guys for years, I decided to see what I'd been missing.

Here's what I found on that first trip: Yosemite may rule for big walls, Pakistan for vertical faces, and Thailand for beach cliffs, but South African climbing is singular. It has something to do with the tangerine stone, the big-sky sunsets, the way the rock has settled into a dawn-of-time landscape. By the end of my stay, I'd sampled the best climbing on earth—in one of its most troubling settings. My hosts lived in walled compounds surrounded by razor wire. Carjackings and rape were at anarchic levels in the cities, and in the countryside, attacks on Afrikaner farms were escalating.

There were still two South Africas, it seemed, and I wanted to understand the divide. So when I went back last November with a rope, a rack, and a rental car, my first call was to Ed.

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