Photographing The Drakensberg Mountains

Sunrise from the vantage point of the Amphitheatre looking east towards The Eastern Buttress and Devel's Tooth.

There’s a stillness to the air, a faint feeling of crisp cold nipping at the skin and fingertips, like a tingling electricity. Silence reigns apart from the whisper of wind as it entices the grass to swish and sway with its breath. The yellow and pale green stalks rustling and leaning out over a vertical and disappearing drop to the waterfalls and rivers far, far, far below. Clouds form and dissipate, curling round the lower hills and their valleys, stretching out and exploring the canyons and forests of the lower mountains. This is the stillness and quiet before the sun peaks it’s burning orange face over the distant horizon in the east. There’s light enough that everything is awash in the magenta and pink glow of pre-dawn. The shadows may be a cool blue, but the sky is starting to ember. Then it appears. A burnt red glows at the top of the taller peaks and ever so gradually washes down the side of the mountains’ tallest heights. Alpine glow paints an extraordinary palette of saturated colour down the flanks of the escarpment. Dawn has come.

This could be any mountain of course. It’s not though. It’s the Drakensberg. I fell in love with mountains many years ago, in large part thanks to the Drakensberg. Since then I have had the pleasure and privilege to walk in and photograph portions of the Canadian Rockies, The American Appalachians, The Peruvian Andes, The African Atlas, and even been able to look at the raw mountainous youth of Iceland’s volcanic ranges. I’m looking forward to seeing the Himalayas for the first time next year and am sad that I won’t be seeing the beauty of Madagascar's hidden mountains this year, that so few people realize even exist, that island being something of an enigma to so many of the world’s travelers.

The Mnweni Needles with Cathedral Peak in the distance just before a summer storm

It’s the Drakensberg where I keep returning to though. It kindled my love of mountains and stoked the flame that became my interest and later life-calling of photography and its concurrent devotion to landscape. I can literally feel the vagaries of my mood based on the length of time that I have been away from the escarpment and the tall peaks that stand like sentinels along its length. There’s elation and a buoyed spirit for some time after I have been able to be in the mountains. A deepening sense of despondency the longer I am away from it. All mountains uplift me, but the ‘Berg’ (the fond shortening of the Drakensberg that all South Africans know the mountains by), satiates me. At least for some time.

Like a heroin addict, there needs to be a hit at some point.. I could joke that like a true addict, without the drug, irrationality sets in. Negative mood swings and desperation for the next hit dominate one’s life and efforts at the everyday. Of course I have never really experienced the debilitating effects of true dependency on a substance, so the metaphor is far from accurate or true. I can say with sincerity though, that I am not the only one who finds their moods affected by the mountains, the thought of the mountains, or the duration of time spent away from the mountains.

Morning light dappling the high Berg with North Peak being engulfed by rising cloud

Click. In 1/15th of a second the scene is recorded on the sensor. There’s a purple-blue tinge to the sky and the Alpine glow is leaching to vibrant yellow as the sun rises higher. Yesterday’s rain storm has cleared the air and it feels like you can see to the edge of the world and beyond. Except we’re floating at the edge of an undulating ocean of cloud. The sharp edge of the Escarpment emerges from the swaying cloud edge like a giant ship cutting through the sea. The camera is locked down on a tripod, the lens’s aperture small so that the everything appears crisp and sharp from the clumps of spiky grass to the shifting clouds in the distance as they gently rise up against North Peak. In a moment the clouds will rise high enough on the rising warm air that we’ll be engulfed in a shroud of cold mist, our expansive view blanketed away and reduced to a visibility of no more than 10 metres ahead. Through this, windows will open in the cloud, calling us to peak out to the world below the escarpment edge as the ocean slowly gives way and we can see once more the valleys and rivers far, far, far below.

Photographing the Drakensberg is an extraordinarily rewarding experience for the landscape photographer. There are more acclaimed international photographers now visiting this majestic range admittedly, but for the most part it still relatively unknown in the international community of landscape photographers. It’s possible that’s one of the reasons that in the inaugural Natural Landscape Photography Awards so many Drakensberg images were featured (I was included in this list and a friend and colleague of mine, Carl Smorenburg, was awarded the portfolio category for his sequence of image depicting the Drakensberg). Despite growing interest in the Berg from a photographic perspective, it’s likely to remain one of the lesser photographed mountains of its stature. At the very least that will likely remain the case for it’s lofty heights for quite some time to come.  

The simple fact is that the Berg is hard to access. Or rather, I should say that it’s hard work to access. Unlike many other mountainous regions of Europe and the Americas, getting into the Drakenberg requires walking with packs on your back for several days to get to it’s best vantage points. Of course this is also true of much of the wild mountains around the world. It just seems to take people by surprise when they first come across the Drakensberg mountains. It’s as if to travellers from outside of the country there really shouldn’t be such a large mountain in South Africa; a country of veld and savannah… not mountains (or so they seem to assume).

The Cathedral Range emerging in a window of cloud

The Berg is big. On average the escarpment edge runs along at about 3000 metres above seas-level for much of it’s length. The escarpment wall itself is even more impressive in that it is just that, a massive geological wall with an average height of about 1 km along it’s length. In quite a few places the wall takes on true ‘wall-like’ form, becoming a sheer vertical stretch of basalt that if you were jump off of, you would plummet by up to and often more than 1000 metres before the struck the slopes far below. To get to the top requires huge effort, hiking up steep rocky passes that were literally blown to pieces by English soldiers a hundred and fifty years ago in order to stymy cattle rustling by the neighbouring Basotho warriors.

In years gone by adventurous hikers would have to be completely self-reliant, hauling heavy packs along with their camera equipment to reach the high Berg. I am in awe of the doyens of Drakensberg photography, Malcolm Pearce and later John Hone, who would haul large and medium format film cameras up the slopes of the escarpment to create their images. This alongside the large volume of trekking equipment necessary to sustain oneself in the high mountains. It can be easier now as a burgeoning mountain porter industry has emerged. It’s possible to arrange porters that not only know the mountain intimately, but will carry most of the paraphernalia required for a modicum of comfort on top of the mountain. For a greater fee you can even access the mountains in the comfort of a helicopter, be deposited along with your gear on the escarpment edge, and then retrieved again a few days later. As an aside we have tried to arrange this as a workshop twice now, and on both occasions have been foiled by the weather and its fickle nature. It seems using using one’s own two feet is still the most reliable way to access the mountains.

A summer lightning storm erupting on the flanks of the Amphitheatre wall.

On the subject of weather, my favourite time of the year to photograph the Berg is November and December and then again in March and April. January (as well as early February) is prone to massive thundershowers that can rapidly turn into flash floods in the lower reaches of the mountain streams. May starts to get cold but is still beautiful with multiple autumnal colours in the grasses and trees. Then winter hits. This means for usually clear skies, and bitterly cold days on the escarpment itself. The dry winter also means there’s less water in the higher reaches of the mountains, but the weather is more stable (hence why so many ‘Grand Traverse’ trail running attempts are made at this time of year - The Drakensberg Grand Traverse is a renowned multi-day hiking trek in South Africa, considered one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences in the country. It's a long-distance route that traverses the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg mountains, from the Sentinel Car Park in the north to the Bushman's Neck Border Post in the south. This journey is not a fixed route, but rather a series of interconnected peaks and valleys that hikers choose to navigate, often summiting peaks like Mont Aux Sources, Cleft Peak, Champagne Castle, Giant's Castle, and Thabana Ntlenyana). In July and August strong winds and smokey haze (from veld fires and grass burning) fill the skies, robbing the air of its crispness and clarity. Late August and early September seem to be the best time if you want to chase snow, but you literally have to be ready to head out at a moment’s notice as the snow forecast changes daily, and once fallen doesn’t last long. Experiencing snow on the high berg is a phenomenal photographic opportunity, but an attempt is not to be taken lightly. Strong windows, heavy snowfall and temperatures well below zero mean that it can be quite dangerous venturing out onto the mountain tops during a snow storm.

There are ways to get close to this experience without the discomfort though. Witsieshoek in the north in the shadow of Sentinel Peak and Sani Mountain Escape in the south at the top of Sani Pass both offer accommodation and restaurants at or near the top of the Berg (Sani Mountain Escape being on the actual edge of the Escarpment and Witsieshoek at the top of the lower Berg but still 500m vertically below the Escarpment edge). However, its the simple pleasure of sleeping wherever your legs may have found you that draws trekkers from around the world to explore the Drakenbsberg and its passes.

Basotho herders and their hunting dogs on a ridge overlooking the Tugela Falls, with Sentinel Peak in the distance.

Click. The Basotho herder smiles into the lens, his hunting dogs looking warily left to right. Sentinel Peak ringed in cloud seems to float in the air behind him. His friend grins in the background. Another encounter with the people who make this eyrie their home. The Drakensberg is really the border and boundary of the ‘Mountain Kingdom’; Lesotho. Having crested a pass you look into a green and brown undulating range of tall peaks. Lesotho stretches on, seemingly empty of people. Until a small speck appears kilometres away, flowing up the slopes and down again effortlessly. The small speck slowly resolves into the body of a herder, dressed in thick and colourful blanket and invariably followed by a string of well-trained dogs, attentive to any call that the man might make. Walking along the escarpment the occasional kraal, with lowing cattle, or skittish horses, and some smoke lazily drifting up from a cooking fire, can be seen in the distance at the base of a valley.

After several days wandering the high places and descending the steep passes. When your legs feel leaden. You look back at the tall basalt spires that stand up close to the Escarpment wall and think on the majesty of the mountains. Of the serenity at dawn, and the sense of accomplishment of knowing you stood there, high above everything else. If the need for the Drakensberg is like a drug, it’s an elixir. A potion of that satiates and fills the soul. You will need more. One visit is too much, and thousand is far too few.

A photographer on a Nature's Light workshop in the mountains turns his back on Catehdral Peak and makes his way back to the campsite