Botmaskop-Saaltjie Traverse

I recall an old Stellenbosch Mountain Club greybeard once telling me that in his day Botmaskop was never regarded as a proper mountain. Well, almost 900 m in elevation gain, albeit along the whole ridge, qualifies in my book. It seems as one progresses along life’s timeline, mountains become higher and “hills” become mountains.

Santie and I were keen to hike in Jonkershoek once more. I  had last hiked there in 2021, just before we moved from Stellenbosch to the Kogelberg. But with the circle road to the Witbrug still closed we opted for the more accessible walk along the watershed from Botmaskop, above my former home, to Saaltie, a saddle above the Jonkershoek gate. This is old, familiar territory. The forestry roads pass the controversial Botmaskop luxury development and traverse the shockingly degraded landscape of the municipality’s so-called “nature area”.

But once we topped out on Botmaskop’s turret-like peak, Jonkershoek, Simonsberg and the Drakenstein massif sparkled in the sharp sunlight of a perfect winter’s morning. We had both been up here many times before, my first ascent having being in 1989 soon after relocating to Stellenbosch. For Santie, who has camped on the flat summit a few times, the place also holds significant personal memories.

If I think back to earlier climbs here, everything was about the views and the exercise. But now, having gradually, almost imperceptibly, absorbed some nature knowledge over many years of hiking with people like Santie, botanists and ecologists, I approached this traverse with different eyes. Having read in Tim Attwell’s book, Your Place in the Kogelberg, that the waboom (Protea nitida) is often found in shale soils, I noted a band of them above the plantation’s granitic soils and below the sandstone cliffs. Clearly, this is a shale band, probably the Cedarberg Formation, a dark-coloured layer that cuts horizontally across  the Cape Supergroup sandstones.

Beyond Botmaskop, almost directly above Herstein Castle, a long, yellowish-red landslip from the top of the ridge has been visible ever since the extreme weather events of 2022, 2023 and 2024. Having looked up at this ridge for almost every day of the 35 years we lived below it, I spotted the scar immediately on my return visits. On this day we got a close-up view from the top. Now there is only a knife-edge ridge on the edge of the new precipice. The newly-exposed rock looks like shale rock, similar to that exposed in cuttings along Clarence Drive off Kogel Bay, but they are more likely to be sandstone.

The scar is huge. It literally took away half of the ridge for about 30 m. It must have sounded like an earthquake when it came down. Robust communities of waboom in the saddles along the ridge seem to indicate continuation of the Cedarberg Formation, although the rock has the colour of the far older, and thus lower, Malmesbury Shales. Or perhaps, the shale layer below the sandstone cliffs gave way and the rest followed. Perhaps a student of geology can shed light? On these flattish saddles, a lot of the soil is clearly not sandstone.

In the context of deep, geologic time, this event is probably just one of many thousand similar ones that have collapsed and eroded these ancient mountains for millennia. We simply were able to witness one such event in our lifetimes.

We took our time traversing the ridge because it was so beautiful and tranquil up there. By the time we started the descent, the sun was low in the sky and the shadows long, so we took some unconventional short-cuts to reach the gate.

This was the last strenuous hike for at least six weeks. On the Thursday after I underwent major surgery which is going to require careful recovery and rehabilitation.

Traverse photo album