Trials and Tribulations of Ntonjelane

When did you hear the gunshots? Was it the Saturday night?


This is where we camped on Saturday night, bottom of Rockeries just before the river crossing. We had locals driving herds of cattle over the river and upstream to a grazing field. They used whips to move the animals and shouted to each other across the valley. Guess that is not what you heard?

Looking at your map, we camped just west of you, so probably not what you heard.

It was Saturday evening, I'm not sure of times as I don't wear a watch, maybe the others will know.
It was dark already, and the first 2 that I heard were definitely shots. I am certain that we were not in any danger, though some of our group were fairly anxious. Probably hunting, or some tribal/clan/smuggling/rustling related clash..

There used to be a stock theft post on the ridge east of Waterfall Cave, I don't know if it's still there, which I presume could observe and patrol the Ntonjelane and Nxwaye valley systems (the Nxwaye river has it's source around Cathedral Peak, and is the next major valley east of Ntonjelane). The upper Nxwaye valley is on the way from the Mnweni area up to the Bell Traverse, and is well known as a stock theft route. The shots you heard could possibly have something to do with this.

Was the thunderstorm on the afternoon of Friday 10th Feb?

Here is a sequence of infrared false colour images on 10 Feb 2017 over southern Africa. The images start at 930 UTC/1130 SA time and are an hour apart.

Red is deep, convective cloud.

By 430pm local time (1430UTC) at least 10 mesoscale convective complexes straddled the interior of southern Africa covering about 1000 km west to east.
As far as convection goes in southern Africa, this was a pretty big event, helped along no doubt by the weak La Nina signal in the Pacific.

Sorry a late reply to this post from my side, you guys had a tough weekend, sorry.

On the gunshots - I was out with DaveE on the Mnweni rockeries loop in September '16, we were crossing the river after coming off the high route heading up the Mnweni valley, when a single gunshot went off and we could hear the guys taking, our assumption was that it was around Shepard's Cave.

I know that you guys we in a different valley altogether, but what I can say was that you are not the only ones to have been around with gunshots going off in the Mnweni area.

We never saw anyone and after that there was nothing else to be heard, we also didn't stick around and made our way as quickly as we could up Mnweni and down the other side.

Yes...the locals do shoot wildlife. Towards the end of winter going into Spring they burn off the veld for cattle grazing management and also to clean up around their dagga fields.....so any wildlife that gets driven out by fire could get shot, as we have experienced before.

The post has been moved into the pass itself, in order to patrol only one path.

Adventure indeed! I'm a little impatient with the healing process, but the ankle is getting stronger, thx Serious for the well wishes everyone!
A special thank you to my gentlemen tribe for taking care of me and sharing the load and being so patient, you rock!