The Orabeskopf face of Brandberg. From left to right: Dogbreath (5.5-5.8, Blumgart-Lichman, December 1974), Painted Giraffe (V 5.9, Burhardt-Doucette-Rutherford, May 2009), Southern Crossing (V 5.11+, Burhardt-Doucette-Rutherford, May-June 2009). Majka Burhardt
Brandberg, Southern Crossing.
By Majka Burhardt, AAC
Bushes, bird excrement, snake paranoia, exfoliating faces, incipient seams—all to get to one perfect crack climb. Throughout May, Peter Doucette, Kate Rutherford, and I explored Namibia. Chris Alstrin and Gabe Rogel joined us to document the trip. At the end, on our last possible climbing day, we completed a first ascent of Southern Crossing, a V 5.11+ (South Africa grade 26) on the Orabeskopf Face of Brandberg, Namibia’s highest mountain. It took seven days of work to find the line, clean it, and do a one-day ascent.
Majka Burhardt starting out the enduro corner on the FA of Southern Crossing, pitch 5, Orabeskopf, Brandberg (V, 5.11+). Peter Doucette
Namibia is not known for its climbing, which is why I wanted to visit. Better known as Africa’s newest independent country, Namibia is the continent’s largest source of uranium and diamonds and the locale of the Namib Desert, the Skeleton Coast, and tribal peoples. In the middle of the country lies Spitzkoppe, with over 80 established climbs. When I heard about it, I wondered where else in Namibia it might be possible to climb.
War, apartheid, and remoteness have combined to discourage exploration of many of Namibia’s vertical landscapes. When I saw an out-of-focus photo of a 2,000′ granite prow, with a mud Himba hut in the foreground, I knew I’d found my objective. The Himba are southern Africa’s largest pastoral tribal group and have maintained their distinct cultural identity despite being on the borderline of battle, resources, and landscape. I wanted both things I saw in that photo: the culture and the climbing.
Peter Doucette leads, and Kate Rutherford and Majka Burhardt belay, on the unintentional first ascent of Painted Giraffe. Gabe Rogel
First we visited Spitzkoppe, an 1,800’ granite dome with slab climbs reminiscent of Joshua Tree. We climbed there, then moved north, driving five long days on dirt roads to reach the Marienfluss Valley and the granite prow. It took only 15 minutes to realize that our 2,000′ objective would be unwise. We were now 18 days into our expedition. We turned to the Himba instead and learned that a 200′ 5.7 was just as valid as a 2,000′ 5.12 when it comes to cultural connection.
We drove south. Plan C was a trip to the Brandberg and a granite face called the Orabeskopf: 1,500’ of pure rock to a 7,200’ summit. It is steep, riddled with cracks, and in the shade all day. The face had been climbed once, in 1974 by R. Blumgart and R. Lichman, who ascended the long, central chimney system. Since then, its remoteness has largely kept it off climbers’ radar.
We started by trying to repeat the 1974 route but accidentally made a first ascent: Painted Giraffe (5.9, SA 18). We returned with six days’ food, a triple set of cams and nuts, twelve bolts, seven hangers, a hand drill, and a single set of pins. We had one week before we were flying back across the Atlantic.
- Majka Burhardt on pitch six of Herero Arch, Spitzkoppe, (5.12 A0, SA 26 A0). Gabe Rogel
During our first day on the climb, Peter and I went all of 200′, while Kate remained tent-bound after inhaling too much bird excrement the previous day, after a thwarted attempt on another line. It took more than two hours to navigate a 30′-high loose block that threatened to keep us from ever climbing a second pitch. And then there were the bushes. Peter and I developed a routine of finding a stance with feet and one hand, using the other hand to attack foliage, sometimes with a nut tool. We had one goal those first two days: to make it to the brilliant orange and green corner above.
Starting up the corner at the end of the following day, I realized the bushes I’d spied from below were those that grew out of the crack. What I hadn’t seen were all the bushes filling the crack. These laughed at my nut tool and only yielded to the hammer. Then I had to reverse the steps to make the crack passable, using the nut tool at the next layer, then my fingers, and finally my fingernails, to scrape root systems from inside the crack.
Before climbing on Orabeskopf, I’d thought the recent rains were a good thing. After digging my hand into the roots of a prickly succulent surrounded by maggot-like beetles, I reconsidered. Any other crack, and I would have given up, but this one had started to matter, had become personal, and this was shaping into a phenomenal climb. Peter and I fought for that 70m for eight hours over two days. Each night we came back to camp by headlamp, on the way filling our water containers, so that we carried up to 18 liters each trip.
I didn’t expect to find great climbing in Namibia; I expected a brief stint of good climbing, followed by a long search for passable climbing. I’d gone to Africa before to merge climbing and culture, in Ethiopia and South Africa, and kept my climbing expectations low and my life-broadening hopes high. I’d told myself that utter climbing success might be impossible. I didn’t say it out loud, thankfully, because if I had, we might not have found Orabeskopf. We might not have found a climb that was better than passable, maybe even great.
On June 1 we woke before dawn, placed our homemade grass brush in our backpack, filled our water bottles, and hiked for the last time across talus and grassy slopes filled with puffed adders, horned adders, and spitting cobras. We racked up and climbed 13 pitches to the top. I sunk my hands into freshly cleaned cracks, their grit pressing into my flesh. I brushed, blew, and kicked dirt off footholds—dirt we’d dropped there from our efforts in the crack above. We chimneyed, offwidthed, jammed, laybacked, and stemmed to the top of Southern Crossing, V 5.11+. It’s climbing I would travel anywhere to do.
The ascent is chronicled in the documentary Waypoint Namibia by Alstrin Films. Get culture and insight into why Namibia might be the new model for African conservation at www.waypointnamibia.com. [Portions of this story were previously published in the 2010 Petzl catalogue: www.petzl.com.]
