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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Technicolor Darkness (cont.)


	Ande de Klerk in Lost World Canyon (Jimmy Chin)

GROWING UP IN THE SHADOW of Table Mountain, Ed started climbing early. At 14, he was pedaling his bike to nearby Elsies and Muizenberg peaks, on the Cape Peninsula. There were a number of black climbers then, men who'd grown up before apartheid marginalized Cape Town's black middle class, including Charlie Hankey, a distant uncle of Ed's, and George Ganget, both of whom put new routes up Table Mountain in the fifties. At 16, Ed joined the Cape Province Mountain Club, a climbing club for nonwhites that had been around since the thirties. Ganget and other members took his skills to 5.8 and 5.9 levels, but within a couple of years he was outclimbing his mentors.

At Table Mountain, Ed would run into top climbers from the all-white MCSA and make small talk, but no one would tie in with him. At first Ed dragged his little brother, Rodney, out to hold the rope. But slowly, he and two other young black climbers, Ed January and Maurice Wyngard, found colorblind white partners. Dave Cheesemond broke the ice, in 1974. Then came Greg Lacey, Tinie Versfeld, and a high school kid named Andy.

When Ed and Andy de Klerk met, in 1981, they were an unlikely match: Ed was 26, Andy 14. Andy already had a bit of buzz as a kid with potential, so Greg and Ed invited him to go climbing on Table Mountain. "It was clear he was awesome," says Ed. "He was climbing quantum leaps ahead of his day."

Their

Ed would pick Andy up at his house—and they'd hit the rocks. They stopped counting new routes at 500. "Race was never an issue," says Andy.

partnership was one most climbers would envy. "Ed took me under his wing," says Andy, who today looks more surfer than climber, with unkempt blond hair and a ubiquitous cigarette. "Race was never an issue." Ed would pick Andy up at his house—with his mother's blessing, which Ed still finds remarkable—and they'd hit the rocks, picking areas where they wouldn't get any racial flak. They stopped counting new routes around 500.

To this day, repeating a de Klerk climb is a serious undertaking. One sweltering day early in my trip, Ed, Andy, and Tinie take me to the 120-foot pitch Technicolor Darkness, in Lost World Canyon, 100 miles east of Cape Town, near the town of Montagu. With a rating of 5.12b, it isn't hard by modern standards, but it's local custom to add a couple of grades to any de Klerk route. When I'm handed the rack to lead, I know I'm in for a sandbagging.

The rock is as smooth as a windowpane and split by a single hairline fracture. I climb halfway up before my forearms fail, and I plummet 20 feet. It's the first of many falls. When I finish the route, I'm thrashed—yet pleased with my inelegant ascent.

"Did I mention that this mad bugger soloed that thing when he was a schoolkid?" Ed says. He and Andy were camping at the route's base. Ed slept in, but 17-year-old Andy got up early and scaled the face without a rope. "Solo climbing is the ultimate in mind control," Andy'd said when Ed took him to task.

The two continued to break new ground through Andy's years at the University of Cape Town. But in 1989, as he was about to be drafted to fight in South Africa's border war with Angola, Andy lit out for Europe, then the United States. He landed in Seattle, married an American climber named Julie Brugger, and didn't return until 1998, after their divorce. He now lives in the seaside town of Scarbrough, 30 miles south of Cape Town, where he makes custom furniture. He's remarried, to a general-practice physician named Charlotte Noble; they have a two-year-old son, Sebastian, and another child on the way.

"Avoiding an unjustifiable war was part of why I left," Andy tells me. "But I also didn't want to lose two years of climbing."

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