By Frederik and Katharien Bakker
Every morning I make coffee for my wife, Katharien, in our house in Johannesdal. While the Bialetti brews, I look across the valley to the Drakenstein Mountains. These days they’re not so famous for climbing – the rock is dubious – yet they pull at you in a way that’s hard to ignore. Directly opposite our stoep lies Duiwelskloof, its forests and trickling streams flanked on the right by a massive vertical ridge rising hundreds of metres into the sky, a line that keeps catching our eyes.
Cautious and relatively inexperienced, we’d so far avoided the classic Drakenstein climbs – Lucifer and Hallucination – in favour of gentler routes like Dragoon’s and Stepladder Ridge. One winter evening, paging through a faded PDF of old routes, we found a 1939 article by R.W. Watson describing a climb of that very ridge climbed by Dr Einhorn, Peter Jenkin, and himself. He graded it ‘E’, which sounded manageable. The name, Desperation Ridge, should have been considered a red flag.
We started before dawn one Sunday in July, stars fading above the Banhoek Valley. The first rays of sun met us at the base in a tangle of wattle. Aware of the potential for an epic, we carried extra food, bivvy gear, and two ropes. A short scramble brought us to the starting ledge, where we built a small cairn and Katharien set off up fairly solid red blocks – better than expected and full of good gear placements.
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