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Category: Drakensberg Peaks
 
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pdf0 Mont-aux-Sources, two French missionaries, and the ascent that never happened
Created: Date Tuesday, 20 May 2014 23:26
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In climbing parlance the rewards of the summit assault and final steps ‘into thin air’ are mentally satisfying and hopefully visually pleasing, moreover if the climb is a first ascent and establishes itself in august written testimony. Consider this pioneering triumph after a long slog through unknown territory:

Strange echoes were heard in April 1836 as two devout French missionaries . . . . T. Arbousset and F. Daumas stood at the edge of the [Drakensberg] Escarpment and looked down in utter amazement as they watched the waters of the Tugela crashing down to the gorge below. Realizing the geographic importance of the mountain, they named it Mont-aux-Sources. (Dodds, 1975, p 20)

Dramatic enough. So dramatic that this episode has passed from mountain lore into commonly accepted fact. Unfortunately this theatrical depiction of Drakensberg trailblazing is entirely fiction. Neither missionary stood anywhere close to the edge of what today is called the Amphitheatre atop Royal Natal National Park.

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pdf1 Mafadi - The invention of a peak and the misconstructions of mapmakers HOT
Created: Date Thursday, 14 July 2011 22:56
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In 1971 a peak on the watershed between Lesotho and South Africa was assigned the name “Mafadi” and has subsequently gained much prominence because it is the highest piece of South African landscape. By now ‘everyone’ calls this peak “Mafadi”. While the actual summit is indeed the highest, its name is of dubious integrity not only because Mafali belonged to an already assigned peak inside Lesotho – for good reasons – but also due to debatable, if not unreliable, map surveying and name assignment (see attached). The author here asserts that “Mafadi” does not belong as RSA’s highest mountain namesake and wonders if there is sufficient scope and scale to bring this issue to the public for a name change. This article is written in the spirit of revisionist re-looking hoping these undiscovered or unrealized facts can speak for themselves. The author has researched primary and secondary sources as well as stood atop the very peak and area in question. It is now time to set the record straight.
This file may also be freely downloaded at this link.
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gpx2 The Khulus above 3300m GPS data HOT
Created: Date Tuesday, 26 February 2008 16:56
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GPS data for the Drakensberg Khulus above 3300m, which are the top 25 summits of South Africa. Where possible the waypoints have been tested and verified by Vertical Endeavour, though a few minor ones are calculated. Last update: 22 July 2010.

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pdf3 Murch List of Khulus HOT
Created: Date Wednesday, 23 March 2016 20:37
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This is a copy of the original Murch List that first described khulus in the 1994 MCSA Journal (No 97).

 

I have stripped out a few of the pictured he submitted, but have retained all the text. If there are any errors in the text, it is my fault, as a result of the combined effort of scanning and manual input.

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txt4 3000m Mountain List HOT
Created: Date Thursday, 25 January 2018 10:35
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This is a list of the mountains within the Drakensberg / Maluti range that are 3000m high and have a topographic prominence of > 7%. The "height" is based on SRTM-1 data and will obviously be in dispute, so any corrections to the data are welcomed. It also goes without saying that better names can be found - I took the name of the nearest peak off the Lesotho 1:50000 maps and then added a directional component to create a name for the highest point.

PS - open the file in Excel as a tab-delimited file

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