Land of a Thousand Rainbows

I haven’t climbed in almost a year now (remarkable, i know. It might change soon.) For some reason I’m feeling a lot of nostalgia for Rocklands (a climbing area in the Cederberg mountains of South Africa. Also, home of Rooibos tea–which actually can’t be grown anywhere else because it needs Cederberg soil bacteria).

When I’m asked where the best place i’ve traveled to is I often say Rocklands, even though it’s less than four hours from where I grew up. We visited three times during our road-trip staying for about eight months in total, living in sprawling tent cities, caravans and various communal farm houses. We participated in a kind of pagan ritual of extreme physical advancement, tribal collectivity, fire-cooked animal flesh, and appreciation of ze natural [as Fred Nicole would put it]. We were surrounded by some of the kindest, warmest and most inspired savages I’ve encountered and I am pretty sure I will count these times as some of the happiest of my life.

So I started this blog post at the time I wrote the SA Mountain article to share the pictures with people outside of SA and include some that didn’t make the article.

Photographers are Dylan Wyer, David Mason, Mina Leslie-Wujastyk, James Kassay, Micky Wiswedel, Nathan Gerhardt, Nicky Ceria, Rus Vakrilov, Sam Davis, James Barnes, Courtney Miyamoto, Carolyn Wegner, Angie and myself. You all agreed a long time ago that I could post these (or I think you’re cool like that) but let me know if that changed and I’ll promptly take down anything inappropriate.

Also, many of these are of projecting, not sending, and some like Amandla and Sky remain unsent projects (sniff). Maybe this post will motivate me to do something about that.

Lastly we lost all our pictures from the main part of the trip when Angie was around climbing. The pics below were mostly taken right at the end of the season when it was just me. So no Angie I’m afraid :-(

So without further adieu, I give you a much overdue collective photo essay on La Rocklands 2014: