VOLUME ONE
TRADITIONAL CLIMBING AT ROCKLANDS WORDS AND IMAGES: Caroline Ciavaldini
IT WAS LIKE opening the door to another world... after four hour’s driving from Cape Town, my husband James and I were among the orange and grey boulders of Rocklands. Climbing is something you have to live. It’s hard to write about, because it’s something you have to feel – like how the rock comes alive under my fingers when I open a new line. It’s the game, the adventure and why we were there. Climbing is hard to resist when you arrive in the Cederberg, a wild area sprinkled with a few farms and a lot of stone. We were not in the middle of a safari park but were surrounded by monkeys, rodents, antelopes and singing birds. The chalk spotted boulders caught our eyes and imaginations. For the first few days we forgot our plans of ropes and gear, to play on the boulders like children. Climbing like this is so intuitive, so simple, you just try to go up. The shapes of the boulders draw you in, tempting you to try your luck. The bigger they are the more seductive the challenge. High lines like Pinotage and Air Star stood proud above all the rest. They are lines that make you dream as you tilt back your head and play out the movements in your mind. In the background behind the boulders were tall cliffs that made the boulders seem like pebbles. I had to find my line. It doesn’t happen every day, to put your hands on a perfect piece of rock and find “the one.” I went for the twin cracks above the camping, in
the middle of a famous bouldering area, without a trace of chalk. I started on my adventure, my harness weighed down by a full set of Friends, expecting a little difficulty through the roof and plain sailing thereafter. But the joy of climbing is often the surprises you find along the way. The roof passed OK, but the following section would not let up so easily and after several minutes of exhausting effort, trying to find a way to pass 20 centimetres of nothing, I slumped onto the rope, defeated. A good crack climber would have eaten the route for breakfast, but with my limited crack experience, I struggled like I rarely had before. To focus on your movements, to remember the order of your hands in the crack, to grimace against the pain of a particularly tight section and grimace a little more to sink the final jam in place; it’s hard work. Yet there is something simple and natural to it. We soon went in search of traditional climbing lines. James decided to focus on a rather improbable line, a British line; a route that almost everyone else would find too scary to even consider. It was a short route, almost two boulders on top of one another, with a wicked hard jump at the very top and a big boulder lying just where you would land. He was half thrilled, half terrified – a good sign, it meant the game was on. The last movement gave him a lot of trouble,
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