The Dragon's Blanket

A group of 4 of us decided (literally 2 days before leaving) to do some snow hunting at Garden Castle on Women's Day.

The following picture summarises the first 2 hours:



The cause:



As we were only 3km from the Nottingham Road offramp, Simon (Fitness) agreed to meet the rest of us at the offramp, and the rest of us got our backpacks and headed off. On the way we stopped and chatted to many people, always fascinating how differently people see the opportunity that arises when you are stuck in traffic and there is snow by the side of the road.



It took us an hour to reach the intersection, by which time traffic had started to move in 1 lane, more or less 5 cars a minute, so slow, but at least it was progress.

The snow along the way was not nice powdery snow, it was icy hard snow, but it was fairly deep.



There were lots of snowmen along the way, they all seemed to have a nice South African touch:





Once we got to the intersection we had to wait an hour before traffic was moving enough that Simon arrived. I got some photos:



We even built a snow blob. It was harder than you would think to build it out of that ugly icy snow...



The hike part of this write up will follow shortly - our mission was to find deep powdery snow on a large scale, will we succeed, story to continue shortly...

Nice pics Ghaz, I can assure you while you "hiked" 3km up the road sitting in the car I honestly didn't think we'd get to our intended destination.
Look forward to your write up

So at about 11 we saw Simon coming around the corner on the Notties offramp, our adventure could soon begin...

To our surprise, we reached Rosetta to find that there was no snow, as we looked over the valley towards the Berg we realised that there was basically no snow until about 2200m.

We realised that Highmoor and Kamberg had very little chance of having the quality and quantity of snow we were looking for, so Giant's Castle it was.

This was Simon's first time at Giant's Castle and Javan's first ever Berg hike.

We arrived to the following views:


Lots of snow, but 12km to the Giant's Castle snow and the rest is fairly high up, we probably won't achieve our goal, but worst case scenario we have a nice day in the Berg and I get some pics of the Dragon wrapped up in her white blanket.

We decided that our best bet was the south facing ridge on Langalibalele Pass route. It was already midday, so we only had 6 hours before I achieve a hat-trick of hikes finishing after last light - not a statistic I am wanting to have achieved.

We covered the bit between the car park and the base of Langies ridge at a very fast rate - less than 45 minutes. Sitting at the base of the ridge I remarked that this ridge looks so easy until you are actually on it. Javan remarked that this Berg hiking isn't too hard, I laughed - we all thought that at some stage on our first hike, at least he just has a day pack!

The view towards Berg View "Peak":


The view towards Langies ridge didn't look very promising, but its our best bet, so we kept going:


We began to climb the ridge, Mike decided to show us all up by heading up the ridge at a rather fast pace, he was soon more than 100m ahead. I heard him shout that we had some snow. When I got to where he was when he had said it I saw a tiny bit of snow in the shady corner of the path - if we have a bit of snow here at 1800m, there should be some at 2200m or a bit higher.

Middle ridge and South Jarding Pass:


As we got higher we could see snow everywhere except for the direction we were heading in:


As we came to 2200m we finally started to see patches of what we were looking for, deep powdery snow (as much as 20cm in places), just not the quantity we were looking for.



The snow was patchy, but good quality:


It was also fairly deep:

There was lots of snow below us and above us, but not a lot at our present location:


The closer we got to Langies, the more snow we had (notice the 2 Hlubi passes, both routes clearly visible in the photo):


White Mountain not living up to its name:


Javan filling his water bottle with snow at 2350m:


Tons of snow on the Gable:


The wind picked up in short gusts, notice the snow blowing off the top of the pass:


At 3PM (our turnaround time) we reached the flat section that leads to the start of Langies Pass. Lots of deep snow, no footprints in it, soft powdery snow, and lots of it:



The view at the end:


We got back to the car park at about 5:45, just after sunset, but before last light.

We realised by the end of it that if we had reached Giants Castle by 8:30 as planned, we could plausibly have reached the escarpment, after all, the pass is on the sunny side of the ridge and is high above the gully so it wouldn't have been too snowed up - we could clearly see the path the entire way up. Nonetheless it was an awesome hike, we achieved our goals and I got 248 photos. A good hike indeed.

Final distance: 17km (excluding the 3km on the road)...

Great write up, was a great day out, just by the way according to my Garmin HR monitor We did 22245 steps in covering the 17km