Easter cave to twins cave

View of the Mitre


In the below you can kind of get a idea of the exposure








Having been on the high path (not that they are that far apart) as soon as I saw Twins cave I realised I was way to high, and the high path kept climbing, so I dropped to the lower path




As soon as you get close to Twins, you just need to drop straight down the grass bank to the path.

This is kind of the route that you would use to find the path from Twins cave

Haha Smurf, I used the headlamp for the road from the Mnweni Centre as I had left early, and just had not gotten to taking my pack off yet to stash it.

It definitely is a worthwhile and scenic route and would be my preference in future too, weather permitting of course, I would not use it in bad weather.

I've done this route a few times, and it is quite strange the difference in exposure perceived when the grass is long and when it is short. I see the grass is short in Warren's photos, but when it is long and you can hold onto it easily, the exposure doesn't seem nearly as bad.

There is a path that drops down a gully before you get to Twins Cave Annex, and you follow the path on the same ledge as Twins Cave Annex, past the annex cave to Twins Cave or the path to Mlambonja Pass. When using this route from Twins Cave, follow the path past Twins Cave Annex - it continues - and roughly the same distance past Twins Cave Annex as the annex is from Twins Cave, there is another small cave, all on the same grass ledge. Just past this other small cave, the route follows quite a steep gully up to the usual path, it is quite obvious if you know about it, and not very exposed.

Utshani Cave is on the path about 100 m or so from Christmas Pass, you should have seen it Warren. It's overgrown now, but was quite a popular cave in the 80's and 90's, and a lot of people mistook it for Easter Cave, thereby also increasing it's use

Three photos I took last year, for what it's worth. The path looks like it has very serious exposure. When I saw it, I decided I would surely not ever hike it    Maybe only RiaanG was listening to the call. 

tonymarshall wrote: Utshani Cave is on the path about 100 m or so from Christmas Pass, you should have seen it Warren. It's overgrown now, but was quite a popular cave in the 80's and 90's, and a lot of people mistook it for Easter Cave, thereby also increasing it's use

Thanks Tony - So I passed the path very close to the top of Christmas pass Gully that I assumed lead to the Utshani Cave as I noted it on my GPS as I continued up, so I didn't see it as I was aiming to take the higher path that you can see clearly from Easter Cave, makes sense though given how much I decended to get to Twins that the Annex would like up with Utshani.

Thanks for the info Warren!

I've often wondered about this section, but every time we wanted to take it we were pressed for time and couldn't go explore. Now I know there is a decent path I'll definitely do the route

We came across this path by accident during our grand traverse a few weeks ago. We had pretty much a total whiteout, and as we were just navigating with maps, had only managed to program individual way points into a watch to navigate by. As such we had navigated ourselves to the top of Ntonjelana Pass, and were aiming next for the top of Mlambonja pass. 

At the top of Ntonjelana we found a group of students from Bloem who has been come up the organ pipes a few days earlier. They had camped near Xeni and were aiming to head down via Mlambonjana, but in the cloud they had overshot the pass completely and had no idea where they were. We said they should follow us to get back on track.

At the top of Easter pass we picked up the path, and knowing we weren't far from the top of Mlambonjana we decided to follow the path, assuming it would lead us there. 

After a brief while, the path all but vanished. We Kept going on, but eventually being unable to see any path ahead, and the exposure severely getting the better of one of the hikers from Bloem, we decided it was best to turn back. We had to help the  guy by carrying his bag for him, shuttling our bag and his bag, as he was extremely frightened of the exposure by this point. All in all our ordeal on the slope took us almost 2 hours

We eventually made it back around, successfully found the top of Mlambonjana and dropped down to spend the night at twins. 

Looking at our GPS readings, and the above descriptions, if we had been able to see anything in the mist, we would probably have been right at the point where we needed to descend down to the caves, and probably would have been able to see them. 

Keeping with the holiday theme, I believe the top of "Easter" pass is actually called "Christmas" pass

Still need to do this path. Every time we get to this area though, it is nearly sunset, we'd been on our feet the whole day so everyone is a bit knackered and nobody wants to attempt the 4km loop from Twins to Easter via the escarpment and then back on this path.