Drakensberg hiking maps

Ghaznavid -
Yeah, lots of stories for the grandkids, but they're still pretty small [5, 2] so I have to hold back on the hairier ones.

kliktrak -
Good to hear from you! And lots of thanks for your concern that someone might have been ripping us off. As you saw on "About us", I'm a bit of a grouchy outoppie these days. Yes, we supply the Geomap series to anywhere in the world, have sent to USA, Finland, Germany, lots to UK, etc etc etc.

thomas - The Mnweni area fell inside the so-called "Upper Tugela Location", which was between the RNNP and Mlambonja Wilderness [then Dept of Forestry]. The UTL was administered by the KwaZulu bantustan government under Buthelezi. Access was almost exclusively via the police post at Isandhlwana [not to be confused with the more famous battle site] or Moliva's Store, if you owned a Landrover [few types of 4x4 available in those days - Landies and Landcruisers were about it]. We did a couple of long trips in the area, especially Mnweni and Rockeries, but we had to rely on MCSA members and other sources for some of the info. That's why we mapped most of the paths as "ways to go" [our invention!] because we weren't sure of their accuracy. Black n white airphotos helped a bit too. Bosbou were trying to persuade the KwaZulu govt to have the area conserved or at least proclaimed a mountain catchment area, but there was a lot of tension between Buthelezi and the SA Govt so I don't think this ever went very far. Hiking and climbing in the area was a bit hairy because [a] it was very remote from any assistance if you needed it, it was quite heavily populated and it wasn't unusual to find that the remote cave you were heading for was full of goats, shepherds and even their families. We spent a night at Chichi Bush Camp and were joined in the middle of the night by four or five guys on their way into Lesotho. They weren't happy to see us - they left again before dawn, with a large mooing and suspiciously-fat looking bunch of cattle ...
The RNNP was indeed managed by Natal Parks [NPB]. The "National Park" suffix confused everyone as SanParks had nothing to do with it at all. We were always amused by the NPB guys - in those days their inevitably-khaki uniforms included an obligatory comb tucked into the top of their long woolly socks.
I've also left you a msg on your page about "Mafadi" - I enjoyed your comments, sorry I used the name for the peak on my map!

intrepid -
The pleasure is all mine, the contact with vertical-endeavour is getting me all fired up over the Berg again ... it's been a long time!

Peter - My turn for a few questions next I hope (and Intrepid - it might be fittings to copy off some of these replies to a newly created Slingsby Berg map thread?).

As I mentioned earlier, I first went to the Berg as a school kid with a few 50 000 sheets and as many of Reg Pearse's maps as I could find. As you note, the 50 000 sheets landed badly on the escarpment, making it awkward to use them when doing a relatively long crossing. So I'd guess that when you started making the maps you were in a similar boat. What did the map-making process entail? Did you work from the 50 000 sheets, annotating them as you went? Did you have back-up from photogrammetry to mark on the paths that you could see on areal photos? How did you decide on the 'rock passes', and what about the caves, what process did you follow to mark them up? And do you have the first edition of those maps? I have a query over the position of Injisuthi Pass that may solve an anomaly about how we once got up the escarpment round about there when using an early edition set in June 1986.

mnt_tiska -
phew! I'll try to be short. We worked mainly from the 1:50 000's, marking them up in the field, supplemented with photos. We did a total of nine field trips of up to 14 days a time, spread over about 3 years, walking most of the time & occasionally with ponies to carry gear . We got lucky a couple of times when the SAAF from Bloem flew in choppers to do exercises. These guys stayed at Monk's Cowl Bosstasie & were friends with Dave Osborne, the forester. Dave organised a couple of trips for us; we did a great backwards-flip off the top and over the Red Wall, then a fantastic ride down the Little Thukela - highly recommended. Looking for caves up narrow gorges with the navigator hanging out the door to make sure there was room for the rotors between the rock walls - very noisy and nerve-wracking for us non-flying landlubbers. But those flights were exceptions, most of it was footwork. We realised from the start there was no way we would get to all the paths, esp. the escarpment passes, so we had a committee of MCSA, Natal Parks and Foresters [& other organizations - Museums, etc] and some of the info came from them. We usually marked their inputs as "ways to go" to stay on the safe side, unless we could pick up their paths on airphotos. We mainly relied on the MCSA for info about rock-passes & any areas that need rope work. Some passes like Ship's Prow were so washed out we argued over whether to include them. Caves: rule 1 was, no caves with rock paintings to be shown at all [Museum's insistance]. In the end we showed a few of these, for safety reasons. We stayed in lots of the others, or again got info from the committee. Some of us - myself, Geoff Ward, etc - had prior experience of some of the caves and routes and this was useful too.
All the drawing was by hand, pen & ink [no computers yet!] so errors were easy to make - we tried to correct those that were reported in for the second edition & here and there we repeated some of the field work. We had a problem in that over the length of time we spent, we didn't always have fine weather; it's darn hard to mark up a paper trig map in pouring rain or even snow [happened twice!] and if you were 20 km out from a starting point it wasn't the kind of place you could easily stroll back to when the weather cleared. Unfortunately [you won't believe this] I have just one set of the first edition in my possession, and somewhere out in the back shed there's even a roll of original artwork, but that's all. I don't think maps 5 & 6 ever went to a second edition, though. My map 3 is 1983, can't really help on the Injisuthi Pass from memory, I must say. I do recall that we got lazy in the "Injasuti" area and spent a bit of time lolling around in pools! Highly recommended, in that beaut area.
Hope this helps.

Maps 5 and 6 would be the southern berg I assume? If EKZN just took your original maps for the geomaps series, that explains how an entire river flowing into the Mashai River is missing on the map - I got caught in a rock wall gully in winter last year with a day pack on due to that mistake! Although we all where ok and it gives me numerous stories, so in retrospect I am actually kind of happy that mistake happened on that map...

ghaznavid, ghaznavid ... both we and Geomaps took the hydrographic info straight off the Dept of Trig Survey's maps ... neither of us being in any position to re-survey every single stream in an area as vast as the Berg. For some reason South Africans call everything with water in it a "river" - as there are no "rivers" running into the Mashai, I assume you are talking about a non-perennial stream or gully that you unfortunately encountered during or after a typical Berg cloudburst. Glad it gave you stories to tell, though ... think of the poor guys killed in the 1970s in the normally bone-dry Ship's Prow Pass, who set up camp in what turned into a raging [and fatal] torrent after a single thunderstorm. That's why my maps bear the words "Treat all stream crossings as potentially dangerous."
I couldn't say that the "stream" you refer to is missing without a bit more info - can you give me long/lat coords? We might need them for a correction someday.

Many thanks for the details Peter - very much appreciated. It has made my day again!

Great to have those details on the number and length of the trips it took to do the work. And also to hear about the SAAF choppers. Were they alouette's? A backflip over the Red Wall must be quite hard to beat - I bet that doesn't come as standard on the Cathedral Peak champagne breakfast run. Imagine the shrieking if it did - it might put an end to the blight.

I read the other day that some Formula 1 cars are still designed on drawing boards rather than on computer - that way you can have detail and see the whole car at the same time - which isn't possible of course on a computer screen. I can see the sense in map making following the same line.

The comments you made on 'ways to go' caught my attention. They make a lot of sense in the Berg and I would guess that a lot of paths these days are returning more to that status as the path maintenance winds down beyond the 3 hour or so day-walker limit from the main camps. I first ran into the 'ways-to-go' on the same trip in Injisuthi I mentioned earlier. We'd had a hard time coming down Corner Pass in deep snow and were intent on getting back to camp from Upper Injisuthi Cave that day. The 'way to go' was shown from where the Centenary Hut now is, down that lovely spur. We didn't really know what to expect, but ended up having a smooth run down that ridge off any path and being really pleased that we'd believed in the map.

I have a few more questions about the map making business. Did you find that the 50 000 sheets had topographical errors in them - e.g. contours that were implausible in relation to the actual terrain - or were they good to go? And did you work off colour aerial photos? I did a mapping project in the early 1980s on Berg vegetation using a fantastic set of colour images - really great resolution compared even with Google Earth now. I wondered who had flown these as that must also have taken quite some time and effort - not to mention wonga.

mnt_tiska -
The choppers were Alouettes. That "backflip" ... we flew to the top of the Red Wall - much shuddering and shaking, the pilot reckoned the machine was taking strain, a real confidence-booster for the rest of us. We landed over the top, facing into Lesotho, and jumped out to stretch our legs. The pilot [sorry, don't recall a name] was a bit nervous about staying too long - didn't want to create an International Incident, this was the SAAF after all. Got back in and to our alarm the machine rose in a backwards direction, then suddenly we were falling with the mighty Red Wall zooming up next to us - it seemed close enough to touch. I'm not sure whether I retained my lunch at that point. The Wall gradually receded and slowed down, then we zoomed away in a big banking turn, back over the camp. I heard the pilot say "Blerrie neat, hay?" in my headphones but I think I was speechless. Sky-diving, etc. never really appealed after that.
The zig-zag trip down the Little Thukela was different but just as much fun. Specially when we scrambled some nudies off a rock in the middle of the river.
Glad you mentioned the contours. They are really problematic; in the old days they were drawn by hand, nowadays they use algorithms that tend to "oversmooth" a lot of lines at 1:50 000. I'm working on a new hiking map of the Cederberg -it's a double-A1 size, about 2 Berg maps. The terrain is really rough and broken; the "official" contours are hopeless. We are busy redrawing and calculating the lot, a big job but worth it in the end. If 1:10000 orthophotos are available the contour definition is much much better, in fact really good, but these maps are rarely available for remote and/or mountainous regions.
Incidentally, the same problem with "ways to go" pertains - many of the old Cederberg paths have all but disappeared.
One does occasionally also come across a contour line that links to one of a different height, thus creating an interesting new dimension, if not a parallel universe ...
I remember the colour aerial photos! Thanks for the memory! They were not all available yet but we used some for parts of Highmoor. I don't know who took them. I think they had something to do with Frank de Wet - he was on "the committee" from Natal Province. Frank was Rina de Wet's father - Rina married Jeff Leeuwenburg, dunno whether the name rings bells for you, but well-known on Cape Mountains. Of the Johnny Klosser/Greg Moseley/Geoff Ward/Ferdi Fischer generation. That probably dates me badly! But if you were working on mapping Berg vegetation at the same time we were mapping paths, might we not have met? I have a vague recall of meeting some veg mappers on Mike's Pass ...

I was refering to the 2 streams that join the Mashai river from the Wilson's River valley between the national hiking way and sleeping beauty cave - only one is marked on the map.