Epic Day Hikes

Just got some photos from Michael - we differ slightly in the approach to day hiking. I won't specify which bag each individual carried...

Congratulations on achieving all the KZN non technical khulus ghaz, that is an awesome achievement.

How did your Eastern Cape trip turn out?

tonymarshall wrote: Congratulations on achieving all the KZN non technical khulus ghaz, that is an awesome achievement.

How did your Eastern Cape trip turn out?

Thanks!

We have delayed the Eastern Cape trip a bit - we will be leaving for it next week.

Hi All, Been catching up on a lot of VE threads! Absolutely loving it!

I last posted in 2009!!! So bear with me pls as I find my bearings again!.

On the topic at hand, not sure if it has been mentioned, but the humble Sterkhorn is a great day hike especially for those starting out with larger one day adventures. Granted maybe not Epic but if you want to introduce people to a taste of the Berg it fits the bill. If you start from Monks Camp its a good full day hike, with great views of the Berg! We have made 2 out of 3 attempts over the years.

There are some epic routes in this thread!
Really looking forward to trying some out, we often find Light and Fast "Microwave" Hikes from JHB to be great options.

I would say the epicness of a day hike depends on the team. A 60km day - say a full traverse of Giants Castle Nature Reserve - would be a tough day out for me, but an easy day for AndrewP.

Giant's Castle camp to the top of Giant's Pass with Ghaznavid 2016-11-28
The last time that I had hiked with Ghaznavid was the khulu-bagging GT in 2014-2015 "Don't follow the lights" www.vertical-endeavour.com/forum/drakensberg-trips/55708-gt2014-15-don-t-follow-the-lights.html?limitstart=0 . In the interim I had precious little opportunity to go hiking due to the greatest enemy of hiking: WORK. My only significant ventures since were a climb of Cathedral Peak on 2015-04-26 (up and down in a day), A climb of Sentinel Standard route 2015-12-13, and a hike from Monk's Cowl parking lot to Keith Bush Camp, Grey's Pass top, and back again over 2016-08-06 to 08.
I requested a hike with Ghaznavid to assess my level of fitness towards determining what difficulty level hikes I could handle with him in the near future. Ghaznavid had some tough hike options available for the day, with the toughest being up to Giants Castle and a finish down Judge Pass. A hike in the 50 km range, but that was not to be.
Our start was good, pretty close to the 3 a.m. start we planned. The early pace was also ahead of anticipated, though a pretty strong and gusty diagonal headwind was knocking us around on the approach to the contour path. The wind blew me right off the path at one point. I led with a brisk pace since I was feeling strong all the way up to about the 2800 m altitude when things suddenly went wrong. Shortly before I had felt a feint queasiness in my stomach but it was not bothersome. When I stopped for a short rest at this point, I initially was feeling OK and when Ghaznavid reached me I told him I was OK, but a few moments later I was hit by nausea and a feeling of faintness. I rested there close to 15 minutes and when we resumed the route up Giant's Pass, Ghaznavid took the lead while I trailed behind at a slower pace.
When we topped out of Giant's Pass I needed another rest of a few minutes. At this point, I was baffled what had happened, particularly how I could be feeling strong one minute and ill the next.

Top of Giant's Pass to Giant's Pass Peak and Giants Castle Peak (2016-11-28)
After the rest at the top of Giant's Pass Ghaznavid and I took a line left to bag Giant's Pass Peak en route to the summit of Giant's Castle Peak. Though I was not feeling well, getting to the top of Giant's Pass Peak was not too difficult since it was nearby. The weather was by this time quite glorious, with little wind. We had some trouble deciding where the summit of the peak was and took photos at 2 possible locations. Unusually, it was the first summit of this one for Ghaznavid as well.



We then headed off in a fairly direct line to the summit of Giant's Castle, but Ghaznavid veared off right to do "Sur the Gable" first while I took my time getting to the summit of Giant's Castle. When I arrived there about 11:20 I was feeling pretty bad, but thought that lying down until Ghaznavid arrived would help. It did not help, and when I tried to eat from an energy bar I could barely get down one bite. I did not finish the energy bar and did not eat for the rest of the day due to nausea. When Ghaznavid arrived I struggled up for our summit photos. Actually I am very surprised that I successfully masked my internal misery in the photos so well. .




We then trekked down around the western base of Giant's Pass Peak back to the top of the pass, looking for water as we had finished all we carried. At this time the possibility that I was suffering from altitude sickness was raised. However, on the way down I started feeling a little better and persuaded Ghaznavid to let me make a start towards the ridge next to Long Wall. I went up slowly while Ghaznavid located the cave near the top of the pass. He caught up again soon after and we stopped at a strong trickle to fill our water bottles, and to rest. While resting I found I was feeling worse again and eventually conceded that going further on the top was out. We headed back to the top of the pass and down it. Downhills are not my forte and being ill made the steep decent slower still. Another factor was that I had started the day with a pack weight about 10.7 kg, quite a few more than Ghaznavid was carrying, but enabling me to stay up there several days. We continued back to the Giant's Castle campgrounds getting back again after 19:30, but still light enough to see without headlamps. By this time I was feeling less nauseous, but still unable to eat and the last easy walk into the camp grounds was rather hard as I was low on blood sugar due to not having eaten for many hours.
To sum up, it was a great day and a worthwhile achievement as bagging Giant's Castle peak in a day (on my first hike in the Giant's Castle area) is not exactly a "walk in the park". However, my first ever bout of altitude sickness ruined the possibility of doing a much tougher hike and defined my fitness level at that point as below par for anything super-epic. This outcome felt as bad as the altitude sickness, but strengthened a resolve to fix the problem.

Testing Followme GPS phone tracking software on the Giant's Castle Epic Day Hike with Ghaznavid

Being part of the KZN Mountain Club backup rescue team the importance of being easy to find in the Drakensberg had been well impressed on me. An app had been promoted for Comrades runners in 2016 for people to find out their location pretty closely and shortly before the hike with Ghaznavid I searched the web to find a suitable app to install for locating my position while hiking. I settled on installing the FollowMee app: www.followmee.com/
My alternate touchscreen phone, a Windows Lumia 640, is used for hiking. (I have a Nokia E72 with button keys to keep my blood pressure low for routine phone use). There are several FollowMee install options with different features including time the location history is kept on their website, and whether emails of location history are set. A free install edition is available which shows current location only, but I selected the standard edition ($3.99 once off) which keeps 3 days of location history on their web site and enables download of a .gpx file of where you were.
Shortly before travelling to Giant's Castle I emailed a friend, my father (and Ghaznavid) to allow them to monitor where I was on the hike from the FollowMee website. I had to supply my login details in my email for them to save my location history.

The results:
My friend Johan monitored my progress on the FollowMee website during the Giant's Castle hike and was impressed with the realtime location of my position on a Google Maps background. After the hike I had a look the next day and was able to download where I had been as a .gpx file. The FollowMee software allows the user to specify up to 15 minute logging intervals, but I had set mine to 30 minute intervals. The .gpx file showed my route as a series of straight lines to the 30 minute waypoints. The .gpx track that I got from my phone using GPS Calculator Pro, had much closer track points, but I was satisfied with the results except for 2 gaps.
There were 2 gaps in the data, but these corresponded with the time before my phone was put onto the solar charger and towards the end of the hike. My phone battery ran down quite fast, though the blame should go to the other software. A few days ago I found that the phone settings allowed most apps to run in the background and either the File Explorer app or the Edge browser app was generating nearly 10 gigs of extra files on its own in a cache folder, even if the phone was on flight mode. A few hours on Google search and playing with the phone enabled me to switch off most apps running in the background and also block caching of my other data on the SD card. The phone appears to last much longer on battery now, so I hope to find the next time that I do this that it will keep its charge while running the gps tracking apps. Another possibility could have been loss of network at these times, however, the app claims to be able to log up to 6 hours of GPS waypoints while the phone is off the network. I suspect low battery to be responsible for the gaps.

Verdict
Based on this test I can certainly recommend the GPS tracking app: FollowMee to allow others to track your location in the Drakensberg. I advise others to change their phone settings to reduce battery consumption though. Carrying a solar batter charger is also advised, especially if the hike extends beyond a day hike.

Giants Castle in a day isn't an easy hike for most people, and is no small achievement - especially after months of not hiking. If you consider that I have done 974km of hiking so far this year, that makes a huge difference.