Taking Care of Our Mountains

While scoping around the Black Diamond Experience website, I found this report about an apparently ordinary (?!) climber’s initiative to preserve bouldering sites in Europe. We can be grateful that our mountains do not suffer the same pressure of numbers, but we also each need to be actively taking steps to ensure we are doing what we can to maintain & preserve this precious environment.

The though behind this thread is to provide links to the various posts about taking care of our mountain environment while we are out hiking & climbing, such as the thread on Cave Etiquette (and the posts on Toilet Etiquette within that thread). These posts rightly appear in various different sections, and the purpose of this thread will be to link them together to provide a resource of how to behave in the mountains in a way that leaves them better than you found them.

It’ll take some time to find them all, but there also are posts on subjects like where & how to wash (body & clothes), building (& rebuilding) cairns, following established paths & trails (especially zig-zags), use of huts, and I suspect lots more.

Of course, the bottom line is Leave No Trace, and hopefully these posts should help remind us how to best achieve that.

Thanks Andrew,

I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments. The more people who are educated to treat our Mountains with the care and respect they deserve the better.

Until we find better links from within VE, here are some links to external sites with useful info:

Berg Hut Etiquette: Berg.co.za

Personal Hygiene: Lowergear.com

Washing Laundry: Laundry on long hikes ; Washing laundry

Following Paths: hikinglife.com

Here are some VE links to guide and inform our interaction with local cultures & art:

Social Etiquette: Notes on Basotho culture for hikers and travellers

Rock Art: Rules for Berg rock art visits

Also wise to check the Berg Alert threads in the Drakensberg Security section when preparing for your hike.

Thanks for posting this Andrew.
I have recently started hiking again after a break of about 18 years, I wish I hadn't stopped because my fitness would have been much better, kit more upgraded and experience much deeper.
Some of the things I noticed, based on only 2 overnights to the MCFS area:
Lots of litter, mainly small stuff like stompies and sweet papers, but even some plastic packets and coke cans (Breakfast Stream).
Disregard for the no fire rule, especially in caves and campsites.
Maintenance of paths, eg the collapse of a 1.5m section of the contour path between BMC and Hlatikulu Nek.
Poor ablution etiquette, on the way back from Zulu cave 2 weekends ago there was a faece right next to the path, and a piece of A4 paper used to wipe the offending orifice. This was probably 3-400m from the office.
As a casual Berg user, I can pick up litter, and carry it down with me, which I'm sure all of us do.
We can also try to talk to offending people about the value of the wilderness area, and why it should be preserved, if we see them and it is reasonable to do so.
We reported all incidents in the Mountain register when we got back, not sure if anything will be done but at least there's an awareness.

Thanks PapaDragon

It is very disappointing that many of the people visiting wilderness areas have so little regard for their role in preserving them, and it's reasonable to presume that those people are also unlikely to be visiting VE. The thought behind linking all these threads to one place is to help inform the people who do care. Armed with this knowledge we can also engage with conviction in talking to transgressors, as you say, when reasonable to do so.

In my limited experience, it's the places easily accessed by day-trippers that are worst affected.