Uklebe/Lotheni Loop: Hawks and Waterfalls

Uklebe/Lotheni Loop: Hawks and Waterfalls

Uklebe Pass was described in the 1985 MCSA journal. With a 2 paragraph writeup and a poor quality photo, not much info has been floating about regarding this pass. My interest in this pass has resulted in quite a bit of time spent on Google Earth or looking over hiking photos, but with little success. Sometimes in life, it is necessary to just stop asking questions and head out and do what you hope to do.

So, having read the very brief description, and having never even been to Lotheni – myself, Mike (Hobbit), Steve (Biomech) and Dom met up at Lotheni. We had planned to hike into Yellowood Cave on day 1, but it turns out that the map is out of date and the road now cuts off about 5km of the walkin to the cave. Revised plan – Terateng Cave for night 1.

We parked at Sime’s Cottage and began our walk in beautiful clear weather. The trail stays very high for quite some time, and it was clear that this was going to be a hot day. The views on this initial high trail were quite something!

The trail eventually meets up with the river that eventually goes up Ka-Masihlenga Pass. The trail follows the wrong side of the fork – so we decided to ditch the trail and head up the steep eroded bank to our right.

Scrambling up this proved to be a bit difficult. We knew we may be away from water for a while, so we all filled up before starting up the ridge. Unfortunately, however, my full water bottle fell out of my pack as I passed my pack up the crumbling slope. We didn’t find it again.

We scrambled up the ridge, eventually gaining the top of the ridge. I had taken some water from each of the others in the group, but I could feel that I wasn’t at 100%. I was sweating a lot and struggling to keep up. I soon realised that I was dehydrated.

We found a trail at the top of the ridge, and slowly made our way up it, enjoying some pretty special views towards Giants Castle, Redi and Ka-Masihlenga Pass. We could also roughly make the pass out from here. We couldn’t see the entire route, but it looked like a pass that will go. There was a good trail on top of the ridge, so we followed this.

My pace was very slow through this bit, with lots of breaks. Dehydration and a fast pace up the hill were taking their toll.

We eventually had to break right towards the gully. We stopped at the first side stream, where I proceeded to drink 1.5 litres of water in 15 minutes. When you are dehydrated, drinking quickly is a bad idea as you will generally just throw up. Fortunately I have been through this enough times to know how to pace drinking large amounts of water when dehydrated!

When we set off again, I was feeling considerably better. We held our altitude just below 2500m as we traversed into the Ka-Masihlenga Pass valley. We found a nice spot right below a waterfall to stop for lunch. It was around 1PM, so the cave we were hoping for was starting to sound rather optimistic. I had forgotten my GPS at home, but I imagined I could probably find Terateng Cave in the dark.

We began up the pass, holding to the true right of the actual gully. Having entered the pass so high up, we didn’t have to follow this ridge for long. Progress was good, the ridge was moderately steep in places, but never really crossing that 1:1 (45 degree) threshold for more than 10m, much like most other Berg passes (baring the likes of Grays Pass – although I know the gradient often feels steeper than 1:1).

We opted to stay low at a shoulder, i.e. to traverse into the gully rather than continue up the grassy side. This required a short awkward move and placed us in the gully right below a 3m chockstone. These obstacles can be bypassed by the higher line (as we later concluded) – but this detour was made with a different goal in mind. Mike had spotted a cave on the other slope. It looked like a good one. We inspected it, and agreed that – even with the numerous roof drips – it was probably still better than Terateng Cave (which was far off). So we passed packs over the obstacle and made our way to the cave.

There was no sign of human use, and the floor was covered in thorny bushes. So Mike put on some gloves and spent the next hour cutting, while the rest of us set about collecting rocks and building a wall near the main sleeping area. There weren’t many rocks in or near the cave, so a relay from the gully was required. After we had been at the cave for an hour, all thorn bushes in the cave, and within 1m of the front, plus the walk into the cave had been cleared. There was also a small wall across the front. This wall needs lots of work to be raised to a usable height, and I would encourage future users of this cave to invest an hour in sorting this out – it is actually a really nice cave with a great view and large capacity.

Even though our newly built wall was only about 20cm high, a 5m long wall does take quite some time to build, and we were happy with the work we had done.

So after some tea, we decided to leave our things in the cave and finish up the pass. Mostly in case it was misty the next day.

Arguably the chockstone above the cave would make it a rock pass, but with a clear grassy bypass, I am sticking to my rating of “non-rock”. There were occasional other obstacles in the gully, but all were easily bypassable by grassy slopes next to them – one really doesn’t need a description of how to get past each one, it is rather obvious as you approach them (although I guess it would be less obvious if you went down the pass).

We topped out around 4:45PM, so we had made our way up the pass rather quickly – especially considering how long we had been at the cave doing our “construction” work.

We got a group shot before dropping back down to the cave. As to the thoughts of ours being the first repeat of the pass – we found some toilet paper in the stream bed near the top. It could have blown down, but more likely someone had been there recently – even if only to chase after lost animals. Animal bones in the gully were also spotted, and there are some well-defined trails that traverse through around 20m below the top of the pass.

We had been admiring a waterfall that we had been referring to as either “Redi Falls” or “Sidewinder Falls”. The wind had been blowing the upper fall back and forth, creating some interesting views. The waterfall falls in multiple stages, and must easily be 500m from base to top.

As we set up our spots in the cave, we began to realise how bad the drips actually were. Steve and Dom took the dry spot at the top, while Mike and I tried a few different spots before taking Steve up on his offer to use his tarp. We used poles and rocks to set this up, effectively ending up mostly outside the cave. The tarp worked and we all had a decent night sleep. We agreed on the name “Hawk Eye Cave” and suspect that this was the first human use of the cave.

Sunday was another beautiful clear day. There was mist down around 2300m, but nothing to worry us.

We went back up to the top of the pass and built a summit cairn to mark the occasion. The cairn is east of the actual gully, but is above the grassy slope which can easily be traversed to save one from having to slog up the last 30m vertically. From the summit cairn, the gully is obvious – although this wouldn’t be my first choice in pass to descend.

We proceeded to climb the Hawk. On the way up, Sidewinder Falls was being blown in the wind at such an angle that it formed a rather impressive rainbow. Definitely one of the more amazing sights I have ever seen in the Berg – and for once a camera was actually able to capture the moment.

We stayed on top of the Hawk for a while, before making our way back down and heading up the Tent. The head-start the day before had given us plenty of time for this day – so we were in no rush to leave the summit of these peaks that offered such impressive views.

From the Tent, we went down to the river, opting to eat supper at lunch time – seeing as Lotheni Cave would be away from water. A friendly local came up to say hello, we shared some food with him and he went off on his way.

We followed the escarpment edge from below the Tent, across to Lotheni Pass. We got a good look down eNtubeni Pass, which looks pretty straightforward – not deserving of the description given by David Bristow:
“Lotheni and eNtubeni Pass: … they both involve some technical scrambling up rock faces and should be avoided by hikers”

There is a southern gully on eNtubeni that looks technical, but the northern gully had no obstacles that we could see – only a very wide grassy slope.

As we reached the cutback behind Giants Castle, we were all stunned by the beauty of this particular cutback. I had seen parts of it from a distance, but the gully is full of freestanding rock pinnacles. I describe it as “messy” due to the number of rocky pinnacles in the area.

We passed a side gully to Lotheni Pass that looked rather difficult from above. From below we later noticed 2 chockstones to be negotiated by this route. Thereafter we found the actual gully, complete with a trail.

We followed the trail before traversing out to Lotheni Cave. The cave is marked as a 4 sleeper, but could easily take 6. It has a large upper sleeping area and a smaller lower area. The middle section is sloping, but useful for storing gear, cooking etc. There is also a small 2 man cave a bit lower down.

After a round of tea, Mike and I set off up the pass with a pack full of water bottles. We could see that the trail down the pass stayed well away from the river for the majority of the pass, so we knew we needed enough water for this evening and a few hours the next morning.

On the way back to the cave, I found my camera near the trail. When I had stopped to look at the map, before heading to the cave, I must have taken it off and forgotten to pick it up again. How fortunate was that discovery!

We watched the sun go down from a ledge in the cutback – it was windy and cold, but really beautiful. The cutback under moonlight was also really quite something.

On Monday morning, when the light was good enough to see without headlamps, we set off down the pass. The trail is eroded in places, but nothing serious. The pass is generally split into 3 routes – the north gully, which includes a 10m waterfall (I got a good look at it, it looks reasonably easy to scramble up, and nowhere near 10m high), the main south gully (which also has a trail down it) and the side cave gully (which we used).

We followed the trail till it crossed the river with another gully. Being a Basotho made trail, it wouldn’t lead to Lotheni Camp, so we decided to follow the river instead. The river was overgrown, but no particularly bad as far as overgrown rivers go.

The map showed a trail coming through from eNtubeni via a saddle, so we decided to leave the river around 2100m, and climb the ridge to find this trail. When we eventually reached the top of the ridge at 2200m, we found what seemed to be a good trail. In retrospect, it was actually a firebreak. We followed this, as it climbed the bump on the other side of the saddle, before it died and we realised what it actually was.

We slowly made our way back down to the river, only to be forced quite far back upstream by cliffs. The stay-high approach has worked for me many times in the past, but you can’t win them all. While this was happening, the mist moved in, although visibility below remained decent.

From here onwards, I can sum up the route as follows: we found a solid trail, followed it for 10m before it died and we went back to making it up as we went along. When we eventually reached the Ka-Masihlenga River, we decided that we were close enough to a trail that Steve’s phone believed existed, that we just made an effort to find it. The trail was patchy at first – much like the one we had been on, but just before a large waterfall that fell into a massive rock pool, we found a solid trail that lead the entire way back to the car park.

So my summary of the routes and caves:
Uklebe Pass: probably worth a 5/10 difficulty rating. The pass in isolation is very easy, but you have to get there, and the climb up from Yellowood Cave is long. The pass affords great views towards Redi. It is worth doing, although I can’t comment on the claim that it is better than Ka-Masihlenga Pass, seeing as I have never done Ka-Masihlenga Pass. To be quite honest, Ka-Masihlenga Pass looks like a lovely pass and I will be back for it. This is not a rock pass, and the 4 caves we spotted (on which we only checked out the one we ended up using) make this a great prospect for groups wanting to hit the route less travelled.

Lotheni Pass South Fork Cave Access: the pass is incredibly scenic and is well worth doing. Definitely one of the best passes I have done (although I think 10 passes would crack my top 5, so no plans to try and rate where I rank this one). I rate the scenery is more impressive than that of Giants Pass. The pass itself isn’t difficult, but budget for extra time on the walkin/walkout.

Hawk Eye Cave: a great cave in winter. In summer it only sleeps 2, in winter it sleeps 8. It is reasonably flat, close to water (the roof drips were filling a 500ml cup in 10 minutes). The view from it is also great. If you head up Uklebe, I think this cave makes for a great overnight spot.

Lotheni Cave: I don’t know why this cave gets such bad press. It is reasonably well sheltered in its little cutback, sleeps 6 (probably only 4 if it raining as there is a hole in the roof above the sloping bit in the middle). It is comfortable and has a great view, but is not close to water. Roughly a 1km walk into Lesotho is require to reach water.

Lotheni area in general: I was once told that Lotheni is “boring”. It is not, it is actually a rather spectacular bit of Berg. I would suggest going there in summer, as the number of waterfalls is really quite something. Be prepared for a lack of trails and you should be fine. Will I be back at Lotheni: unquestionably. Also – the roads aren’t nearly as bad as people make them out to be.

Well done to all of you for braving the unknown