Lammergeier Pass

This is the official thread for Lammergeier Pass in the Bushman's Neck area. The pass is not marked on the map and the name was put forward on berg.co.za, presumably derived from Lammergeier Cave which is on the map. This cave lies on the pass route. The summit of the pass is close to Goat's Cave. It isn't a very obvious pass compared to many other Berg passes and didn't really have a distinct track when I did it but this may have changed as it was some time ago. Not to be confused with  Lammergeyer Pass in the Free State, the name of which was put forward by Derek Odendaal.

Thanks for the photos Richard. Yes, the pass is at first thought not an obvious one. However it definitely provides a way over the range and crosses the watershed. It actually is similar to Thamathu Pass and Ngwangwane Pass in some ways, just that the latter two are established and it doesn't strike us as odd in those cases.

It gets really interesting around the Sehlabathebe border. The Knuckles Passes seem obvious enough because they resemble what we are accustomed to in the rest of the Berg. But then the Knuckles taper down in the South well across the border into Lesotho resulting in a radical change to the escarpment edge, which is much lower and less distinct along the Sehlabathebe border. But  it remains the watershed and still crosses "the range" so to say. This part of the escarpment looks "Little Berg-ish", yet there are established passes in this section too, such as Bushman's Neck Pass. This then implies that any route that crosses over into Sehlabathebe from Bushman's Neck is technically a pass. Dave has documented the route up to Tarn Cave directly from the valley beneath it as "Tarn Cave Pass" on berg.co.za. It isn't what we would instinctively want to call a pass, but consistent thinking implies that it is.