Bannerman/Around the Corner Injisuthi loop
22 May 2016 21:03 - 23 May 2016 10:02 #68528
by ghaznavid
Bannerman/Around the Corner Injisuthi loop was created by ghaznavid
No clever/funny hike name comes to mind, so insert your own 
It is hard to think how this report should be started, it is rather odd how things turned out in the end!
We had planned to do a rather optimistic traverse of Giants Castle in 2 days with a head-start. So on Friday afternoon, shortly after Mike got home from school, we were off to a familiar nature reserve – Giants Castle.
Driving in felt very strange, I have driven to Giants many times – probably more than anywhere else in the Berg – but to find ourselves on a dirt road was a surprise.
After filling in the register, sitting in some light drizzle, we had supper at the picnic site, before embarking on the walk to Bannerman Hut. We left the picnic site around 6:20PM, and arrived there around 9:30. The drizzle and some mist higher up meant that we arrived cold and wet.
The hut was full of litter, and someone had covered some of the beds in straw and space blankets. Nonetheless, we had a short night sleep, and at 3:30AM, the alarm went off.
Bannerman Hut has a tendency of making a gentle breeze sound like a gale, a fact that I had forgotten in the 5 years since I had last stayed here. Bannerman Pass was the second pass I did in the Berg, and was the first pass I had done 4 times. But the last time I did it was in April 2011, when I had been a lot less fit and knew much less about the Berg. Actually, not entirely sure I really knew anything about the Berg – I just wanted to bag Popple!
Anyway, back to recent history, at 4AM we began to head up the pass. There was some mist around 2000m, but it was clear and icy at the hut. The full moon was making the pass look really ominous. The moon had set behind the mountains, giving a dramatic silhouette.
As I remembered it, the trail basically dumps you in the riverbed and promptly dies. The moon light was counter-productive, doing little more than confirming the fact that we were in the right general area – a fact of which I was quite aware, it would be a hard gully to miss!
A bit higher up, after some boulder hopping, we found a good trail again. I don’t know if this trail was always there and I never found it before, or if it was new – but one way or another, it was very helpful!
The sun came up when we were nearing 2700m. We had hoped to be up the pass before the sun was up, but either we were struggling, or Bannerman Pass is genuinely not an easy pass. Based on how the rest of the day went, I am going to go with us having a bad day!
Anyway, we topped out to find a lot of frost. Our shoes were still wet from the day before, and the frost did good job of freezing my feet!
We filled up our water in the stream below Gypaetus Point, before starting the slog up Popple. We ignored the khulu, before taking a more direct line towards Mafadi. By the time we reached the Mafadi/Injisuthi Dome saddle, the talk of hitting Bannerman Cave for the night was beginning to switch to Upper Injisuthi Cave. Funny for two people who had supposedly trained so hard to find a day of heading from Bannerman Hut to Bannerman Cave via Bannerman Pass so difficult!
Anyway, we thought Mike was on 99 khulus, and he was adamant that Red Wall was not a worthy 100th, so we walked past it and shot for the Injisuthi Buttresses. Mist had begun to come over as we walked past Hilton Pass. It is notable that there is a large cave right at the top of the pass. It has clearly been used before.
We hit the summit of the Lesser Buttress in the mist. We sat on the top for about 30 minutes, with some mist clearing, giving us some amazing views. We went from there to the Greater Buttress, also in the mist, but with no brief clearing.
As we began to walk up back towards Red Wall Peak, the mist cleared completely – sounds about right, doesn’t it!
After an “audit” of Mike’s summits, we found that Red Wall was actually his 99th – I suspect he would have been highly annoyed if it was his 100th! Nonetheless, he now only needs Giants to have all the 3300m khulus – not bad for a 15 year old!
We took a high traverse below Mafadi and Injisuthi Dome before managing to traverse above the cliff line in which Upper Injisuthi Cave is found – not the first time I have used a GPS to find myself on a cave roof. Not even the first time for this particular cave! We reached the cave as the sun went down.
Fast and light means no gas stove, so supper was tuna-mayo on crackers. Actually a meal I prefer to 2 minute noodles/couscous with tuna/biltong – although a cup of soup would have been nice!
Sunday morning – seeing as we were no longer planning on bagging Giants Castle, we could sleep in a bit. So 5:30 we were up, and eventually Mike was ready to leave by 6:30 – if he wants to do speed hiking, he will need to work on this.
We started by walking down to the escarpment edge to watch the sunrise from near the Triplets – what a spot to watch the sun come up!
After walking around near the Triples and getting some photos, we began the slog up the Mafadi ridge, taking the saddle near Trojan Wall. For those who have never walked along the escarpment edge above the Red Wall (the actual wall, not the khulu) – you are missing something really special. In my recent experiences, basically any spot on the escarpment edge that you haven’t traversed yet is something special that you are missing!
We decided to go down Around the Corner Pass – Google Earth tells me that is 17km (as the crow flies) from the planned Elandshoek Pass. On the bright side, this has been the only pass I have left at Giants since I did Corner Pass in 2014.
We built a summit cairn, seeing as there was none. The trail down the pass is very easy to follow, but it notable that the pass is very exposed in places. There are 3 scrambles between the top and where it joins Corner Pass – the top one is a traverse, reasonably easy when dry, but it wouldn’t be nice if wet. The middle scramble is your pick between a very exposed traverse on a good ledge or a slightly harder but not exposed short scramble down a rock. The biggest and most exposed bit is just before you get to the point where you traverse into the Corner gully – it entails some traverses and some down-climbing. I rate the pass warrants a light rock rating (i.e. rock, not Rock or ROCK). Someone like AndrewP would say “what scrambling”, someone like TonyM would call it easy scrambling, but for me it is outside my comfort zone, and did cost us a lot of time. In summary – I wouldn’t recommend coming down this route, and I wouldn’t recommend it if wet – but there is a trail the entire way and it is a worthwhile pass.
Seeing as we were walking out to Giants, we went down the conventional Corner gully from the switchover point – the Northern High Approach leaves the gully about 10m vertically below where the passes meet (well, this might be confusing because we were going down – but NHA enters the gully about 10m below the Around the Corner split).
We hit the contour path at 11:30, and motored it from here to the car park back at Giants, arriving at 3:07 PM. To paraphrase Voltaire – this route neither contours, nor is there a path. Ok – the trail is only bad for about 1km, but still. My GPS tells me that our contour path stretch included 500m in altitude loss and 270m in altitude gain. Nonetheless, Upper Injisuthi Cave to Giants Car Park in about 8h45 is around 2.9km/h – so not express pace by any means, but still a solid way to end a weekend out.
Incidentally, this hike ended with Mike and I having hiked 1500km together, and having bagged 98 khulus together.
Stats:
Distance: 60km
Altitude gain and loss: roughly 3300m (2700m per my GPS, but we did not record a track from the start to Bannerman Hut)
Total time – including sleeping: 44h40
Average moving pace: 3.2km/h
Average overall pace: 1.34km/h (wow – that is slow!)
Overall – we didn’t achieve what we set out to do, not even close! Still a good weekend out. As the old saying goes “if you always reach your goals on the first attempt, you aren’t setting challenging enough goals”. And yes, I know this hike would have been much shorter from Injisuthi – but that did not fit the original plan. A plan must be flexible, and sometimes things go this way.
It is hard to think how this report should be started, it is rather odd how things turned out in the end!
We had planned to do a rather optimistic traverse of Giants Castle in 2 days with a head-start. So on Friday afternoon, shortly after Mike got home from school, we were off to a familiar nature reserve – Giants Castle.
Driving in felt very strange, I have driven to Giants many times – probably more than anywhere else in the Berg – but to find ourselves on a dirt road was a surprise.
After filling in the register, sitting in some light drizzle, we had supper at the picnic site, before embarking on the walk to Bannerman Hut. We left the picnic site around 6:20PM, and arrived there around 9:30. The drizzle and some mist higher up meant that we arrived cold and wet.
The hut was full of litter, and someone had covered some of the beds in straw and space blankets. Nonetheless, we had a short night sleep, and at 3:30AM, the alarm went off.
Bannerman Hut has a tendency of making a gentle breeze sound like a gale, a fact that I had forgotten in the 5 years since I had last stayed here. Bannerman Pass was the second pass I did in the Berg, and was the first pass I had done 4 times. But the last time I did it was in April 2011, when I had been a lot less fit and knew much less about the Berg. Actually, not entirely sure I really knew anything about the Berg – I just wanted to bag Popple!
Anyway, back to recent history, at 4AM we began to head up the pass. There was some mist around 2000m, but it was clear and icy at the hut. The full moon was making the pass look really ominous. The moon had set behind the mountains, giving a dramatic silhouette.
As I remembered it, the trail basically dumps you in the riverbed and promptly dies. The moon light was counter-productive, doing little more than confirming the fact that we were in the right general area – a fact of which I was quite aware, it would be a hard gully to miss!
A bit higher up, after some boulder hopping, we found a good trail again. I don’t know if this trail was always there and I never found it before, or if it was new – but one way or another, it was very helpful!
The sun came up when we were nearing 2700m. We had hoped to be up the pass before the sun was up, but either we were struggling, or Bannerman Pass is genuinely not an easy pass. Based on how the rest of the day went, I am going to go with us having a bad day!
Anyway, we topped out to find a lot of frost. Our shoes were still wet from the day before, and the frost did good job of freezing my feet!
We filled up our water in the stream below Gypaetus Point, before starting the slog up Popple. We ignored the khulu, before taking a more direct line towards Mafadi. By the time we reached the Mafadi/Injisuthi Dome saddle, the talk of hitting Bannerman Cave for the night was beginning to switch to Upper Injisuthi Cave. Funny for two people who had supposedly trained so hard to find a day of heading from Bannerman Hut to Bannerman Cave via Bannerman Pass so difficult!
Anyway, we thought Mike was on 99 khulus, and he was adamant that Red Wall was not a worthy 100th, so we walked past it and shot for the Injisuthi Buttresses. Mist had begun to come over as we walked past Hilton Pass. It is notable that there is a large cave right at the top of the pass. It has clearly been used before.
We hit the summit of the Lesser Buttress in the mist. We sat on the top for about 30 minutes, with some mist clearing, giving us some amazing views. We went from there to the Greater Buttress, also in the mist, but with no brief clearing.
As we began to walk up back towards Red Wall Peak, the mist cleared completely – sounds about right, doesn’t it!
After an “audit” of Mike’s summits, we found that Red Wall was actually his 99th – I suspect he would have been highly annoyed if it was his 100th! Nonetheless, he now only needs Giants to have all the 3300m khulus – not bad for a 15 year old!
We took a high traverse below Mafadi and Injisuthi Dome before managing to traverse above the cliff line in which Upper Injisuthi Cave is found – not the first time I have used a GPS to find myself on a cave roof. Not even the first time for this particular cave! We reached the cave as the sun went down.
Fast and light means no gas stove, so supper was tuna-mayo on crackers. Actually a meal I prefer to 2 minute noodles/couscous with tuna/biltong – although a cup of soup would have been nice!
Sunday morning – seeing as we were no longer planning on bagging Giants Castle, we could sleep in a bit. So 5:30 we were up, and eventually Mike was ready to leave by 6:30 – if he wants to do speed hiking, he will need to work on this.
We started by walking down to the escarpment edge to watch the sunrise from near the Triplets – what a spot to watch the sun come up!
After walking around near the Triples and getting some photos, we began the slog up the Mafadi ridge, taking the saddle near Trojan Wall. For those who have never walked along the escarpment edge above the Red Wall (the actual wall, not the khulu) – you are missing something really special. In my recent experiences, basically any spot on the escarpment edge that you haven’t traversed yet is something special that you are missing!
We decided to go down Around the Corner Pass – Google Earth tells me that is 17km (as the crow flies) from the planned Elandshoek Pass. On the bright side, this has been the only pass I have left at Giants since I did Corner Pass in 2014.
We built a summit cairn, seeing as there was none. The trail down the pass is very easy to follow, but it notable that the pass is very exposed in places. There are 3 scrambles between the top and where it joins Corner Pass – the top one is a traverse, reasonably easy when dry, but it wouldn’t be nice if wet. The middle scramble is your pick between a very exposed traverse on a good ledge or a slightly harder but not exposed short scramble down a rock. The biggest and most exposed bit is just before you get to the point where you traverse into the Corner gully – it entails some traverses and some down-climbing. I rate the pass warrants a light rock rating (i.e. rock, not Rock or ROCK). Someone like AndrewP would say “what scrambling”, someone like TonyM would call it easy scrambling, but for me it is outside my comfort zone, and did cost us a lot of time. In summary – I wouldn’t recommend coming down this route, and I wouldn’t recommend it if wet – but there is a trail the entire way and it is a worthwhile pass.
Seeing as we were walking out to Giants, we went down the conventional Corner gully from the switchover point – the Northern High Approach leaves the gully about 10m vertically below where the passes meet (well, this might be confusing because we were going down – but NHA enters the gully about 10m below the Around the Corner split).
We hit the contour path at 11:30, and motored it from here to the car park back at Giants, arriving at 3:07 PM. To paraphrase Voltaire – this route neither contours, nor is there a path. Ok – the trail is only bad for about 1km, but still. My GPS tells me that our contour path stretch included 500m in altitude loss and 270m in altitude gain. Nonetheless, Upper Injisuthi Cave to Giants Car Park in about 8h45 is around 2.9km/h – so not express pace by any means, but still a solid way to end a weekend out.
Incidentally, this hike ended with Mike and I having hiked 1500km together, and having bagged 98 khulus together.
Stats:
Distance: 60km
Altitude gain and loss: roughly 3300m (2700m per my GPS, but we did not record a track from the start to Bannerman Hut)
Total time – including sleeping: 44h40
Average moving pace: 3.2km/h
Average overall pace: 1.34km/h (wow – that is slow!)
Overall – we didn’t achieve what we set out to do, not even close! Still a good weekend out. As the old saying goes “if you always reach your goals on the first attempt, you aren’t setting challenging enough goals”. And yes, I know this hike would have been much shorter from Injisuthi – but that did not fit the original plan. A plan must be flexible, and sometimes things go this way.
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