Water Watch 2023

 The aim of Water Watch is to help in the planning of hiking trips to the Drakensberg, based on water availability along trails and at caves and camp spots. This becomes particularly relevant some time during the winter, and water-scarce conditions often persist through to November.

The main use of these threads has been question-based, i.e. people ask what the known water availability is when planning an upcoming trip. To a lesser extent people have proactively posted observations from trips they have just done. This is something that is encouraged as it would be great to see more of this proactive approach. It will reduce the need to ask questions and it will also help us develop a general awareness for given locations. It may be viable to formulate a list of critical locations (for example Bell Cave and Twins Cave) which people can then very quickly report back on if they have been there recently.

Lastly, these threads have at times been used for discussion on rainfall amounts, and the threads have seen active discussions during the rainy months. This is another area of growth that is encouraged. We have seen this with the Snow Watch threads and it is nice to see an interest and awareness of weather-related knowledge on this forum.

Historical Water Watch threads:
Water Watch 2015
Water Watch 2016
Water Watch 2017
Water Watch 2018
Water Watch 2019
Water Watch 2020
Water Watch 2021
Water Watch 2022