Table Mountain Classics – a guide to walks, scrambles and moderate rock climbs
Tony Lourens
(Blue Mountain Publishers)
Busy with our lives in the city and suburbs, we often take the great mountain looming over us for granted. But when you go up the mountain, on foot or in the cablecar, you get a wonderful new perspective, not just of height and beauty, but of the relative importance of things.
You stand on the summit and look down at the cars buzzing along the freeways and then you look up and perhaps see a kestrel against the blue sky, and remember that we live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Publisher and climber Tony Lourens invited a group of people up the mountain last week for the launch of the new edition of his mountain guide, Table Mountain Classics. The sun was shining on the summit, but mist kept rolling up the slopes, playing hide and seek with Devils Peak and Table Bay. It was magic.
For Tony Lourens, Table Mountain has been magic all his life. As a boy he and his family used to braai at Kirstenbosch – this is going back a bit – and he would venture to the start of the ferny mystery of Skeleton Gorge. Later he joined Wynberg Boys’ High School’s mountain club, and as a 13-year-old, climbed to the summit for the first time – via a D-grade route on the Camps Bay side (not really for beginners).
It didn’t matter. Lourens made it, and started a love affair with the mountain and climbing that has lasted more than 40 years. In 1998 he published the first edition of his guide to the mountain, and last week he launched a revised, updated and expanded second edition.
The book is not a guide to the Table Mountain chain – it confines itself to Table Mountain itself as far as Constantia Nek, but includes Lion’s Head, Devil’s Peak and the mountain as far as Judas Peak above Llandudno.
Lourens and friends, including partner Karin Igesund, who appears in many of the pictures (“I’m the default option,” she says modestly) have climbed virtually every ravine, gully and valley, buttress and wall, experiencing “blissful times and moments of terror”.
This close knowledge and experience has led to a book that includes the well-known walks and climbs as well as many unusual ones – including 45 not listed in the first edition. Some of the routes were found by pouring over old Mountain Club of South Africa journals – one has been published every year for more than a century – and then trying them.
Some were forgettable, but others were awesome, says Lourens, and they were included.
Each route listed has a brief overview, the grade and likely time it will take, and how to get to the start. There is also what is called a topo photograph – a picture of the mountain with the climb picked out in dotted lines so you can see precisely where to go.
This is not a book for experts, Lourens stresses. It’s for anyone interested in getting out on to the mountain. While it does include some D-grade climbs (“serious climbing where the use of rope and protection equipment are necessary”), it has many A-grades (“walking on a path of sorts, but can on occasion entail some very minor scrambling”).
And apart from the routes, it has a whole section described as “interesting reading”. This includes chapters on the mountain’s flora and fauna, and a fascinating historical section, with pictures, looking at the climbers of a century ago, who climbed in hobnail boots, with the women in long skirts or old-fashioned serge gymslips.
We’re told of a man called Nicolaus de Graaff who in 1679 was the first person recorded as spending a night on the mountain, to the horror of his friends who feared he would be devoured “by lions, bears, tigers and other wild beast of which many dwell in these valleys and crags”. De Graaff reportedly had a restless but uneventful night and descended the following morning.
There is also a section on the building of the reservoirs on the summit as well as the cable station. And there are short articles on places of interest on the mountain such as Kirstenbosch, the King’s and Queen’s Blockhouses, and Rhodes Memorial.
In this last section, Lourens points out that although Cecil John Rhodes might no longer be a colonial hero, we can be grateful to him for bequeathing his estate to the state, ensuring that the whole stretch of mountainside from Devils Peak to Kirstenbosch would be protected from developers and there for our pleasure. - Sunday Argus