The High Ground

The title of this post was just a more eloquent way of formally introducing an initiative which has emerged and evolved, and one which even now continues to evolve. It concerns the summits of the Maloti-Drakensberg, which, in spite of all the collective passion and knowledge of the Drakensberg we have here, remains a concept which is enigmatic, shrouded, ignored, not fully understood, and even debated on the bits we do know. And as many studies in various fields will often show, the more you know, the more your realise that which you don't know.

The concept of Drakensberg summits most often comes up in connection with a reference that is often used on this forum, namely "the Khulus". The history and technicalities of what the Khulus are all about is not my direct concern with this post. Rather, this post is to introduce an initiative which has grown out of a common interest in the Khulus by members of this forum. A group of us, through personal pursuits in the Berg and a lot of email chats, have formalised and pooled our information and ideas, with the intention of producing an end result that properly and adequately recognises the summits of the Drakensberg, inspiring an appreciation that they deserve. In trying to thrash out what a Khulu is and what peaks should have this title, we have uncovered more than we initially bargained for. It isn't simply a question of what a Khulu is - more questions arise when you start asking that initial question. What is a peak? What is a summit? What do we do with all the peaks in Lesotho? To name a few.

We would like to table this initiative and open it up to the community. These concepts and questions belong to all of us to delve into ultimately. And with the capacity of this forum now to catalise such projects, and to bring people together to work on them - instead of having a scattering of individuals and groups - we hope to ultimately get to a place where we can agree on and feel an ownership and pride over the peaks of our Drakensberg. As it is, currently we do not even have a properly accepted, formal list of "South Africa's highest peaks", or "the highest peaks of the Maloti-Drakensberg" - the lists that are out there differ from each other, many peaks are surprisingly overlooked, and a large portion do not have formal names (some don't have names at all!). Wouldn't it great if we could get to a place where we can say with certainty, "Here is a definite list of summits and peaks that we have here in our Drakensberg!", or, "Our top ten peaks? This is them!" Sometimes the word "conquering" is used when talking about mountains, but ultimately we only want to inspire a recognition and pride over our mountains with this. We acknowledge that these are all just lenses through which we, as man, study that which surrounds us. It is we who need to solve these questions for ourselves, the mountains have no need for them. It is however in the grappling of these questions that we discover them more, appreciate them more, and hopefully ultimately look after them more.

This group I have referred to currently consists of tonymarshall, ghaznavid, AndrewP and myself. Our work and discussions are by means of an email chat group. That we decided to keep the bulk of this off-forum had a bit to do with the history of how this evolved. It is also very much a work in progress, experimental, often messy, and can get extremely technical, which doesn't necessarily make for good forum material, especially for a topic which does not currently enjoy very wide interest. We have grown into an active work group, rather than a discussion group. We fully believe that this belongs to everyone however, and that many aspects and details should be openly discussed on this forum. We believe that broad consensus and common understanding should be reached with the entire community - and not just those who participate on this forum, but including other organisations and individuals who may have an interest, and who have an active knowledge of the Drakensberg. We would like to introduce our findings and our ideas thus far, putting forward some key questions and issues that need to be worked through. We would also like to extend an invitation to anyone to join our work group. Anyone who is eager to be actively involved is more than welcome to join - in fact we need more help!

Subject to change, the following defines more specifics of what we are trying to achieve at the current time:
1. Work with the Khulu concept, re-shaping it where appropriate, in order to mature the idea and bring it to a wider acceptance and appreciation.
2. Create useful and robust definitions, terms and criteria for describing and distinguishing peaks, summits and Khulus.
3. Incorporate the greater context of the entire Maloti-Drakensberg area, with summits in Lesotho that are significant to the Drakensberg escarpment, with the hope that this will lay the foundation for later work on Lesotho summits and the "Kgolo" concept.
4. Compile a comprehensive list of relevant Drakensberg summits, complete with categorisation and technical data.
5. Catalyze a broader appreciation, understanding and participation in the pursuit of Drakensberg summits.
6. Lay the foundation for the recognition and naming of significant peaks that have no official names, and suggest colloquial or temporary names for all recognized, unnamed summits.

There will be much more to follow naturally, this being only an initial post to open this up to everyone.

Bobby your participation and expertise are certainly very welcome.

We do give credit to Murch's work and mention it often, as it was the pioneering study on this that we are aware of (there may well be more of a history here). But his criteria were definitely not water-tight or robust enough to leave his list unchallenged. And the closer you look at Drakensberg summits the more it becomes apparent that there are more problems with his list than simply the criteria he used. So while we respect his work, we definitely agree that we cannot use his criteria and believe we can come up with revised, more robust, and less subjective ones. Prominence is definitely a concept which has featured strongly in our discussions. Likewise a closer look at the Lesotho border/watershed is also providing some very interesting findings (though it is making the work somewhat more complex), so your work on revising the border on the maps is certainly going to be helpful.

My feeling currently, is that one single list of peaks is not going to be fully representative of the Maloti-Drakensberg. It remains to be seen, but it may well be a case of needing to look at it multi-dimensionally, bringing out different lists to highlight various aspects. One such example is a list of South Africa's highest summits vs a list of high peaks or summits of the entire Maloti-Drakensberg. It could be that some summits will be listed under the first, but will not make the second list due to being overshadowed by a Lesotho neighbour that makes it less peak-like, if that makes sense.