Maanskynkop Frontal

One for the books!

Maanskynkop is part of a mountain range in between Hermanus and Stanford that can be seen from Doug’s parents front porch, so naturally we had our eye on it over the December holidays while we were home. Doug was constantly scheming possible lines up the front face, and spent a while trying to find info online.

All we could find was a very bare line that Clinten Martingengo attempted a while ago, but not much else.

After a few drive-by’s and sketches of route choices we eventually settled on the obvious diagonal ridge feature that broke up the main blank face between the massive column that Clinton climbed, and another big blank column.

To get to the rockface we had to first make our way up the grassy slope from the highway. With no path and a few private properties on the edge of the highway we decided to park the car directly beneath our intended route at about 6am, hop a few fences and bush bash our way directly up the slope to the base of the rock. The grassy slope turned out to be more like dense bush / protea forest, and incredibly steep - to the point where we were grabbing onto branches and hauling ourselves up near vertical scrub.

We got to the base of the rockface at about 9.30am, where the magnitude of the climb started to look LOT bigger than what it looked like from the road. I was a bit sceptical, and as we started our way up the first proper pitch I kept my eye out for an escape route. We could potentially abseil down the gully on the left of our feature, however the rocks in the gully looked a bit loose so we would have struggled finding something solid to abseil off of.

The first couple of pitches were fairly straight forward; we stuck to the rock face infront of our ridge-feature with Doug leading and myself following. I realised on the 3rd or 4th pitch that doug had every intention of making it to the top - I asked him if he was keeping an eye on our escape route incase it got too difficult and his response was “nope, we’re going to have to bail upwards!”. Classic.

It was around about here that i was starting to feel quite exposed and we got to a route-finding decision point. The face on the front of the ridge looked quite steep and blank, and there was an opportunity to hook left into the gully behind the ridge. A nice safe, cozy gully..

For some reason we went against every warning in our head telling us to keep out of the gully, and we hooked a left. We regretted it almost immediately (doug moreso than myself as he now had to lead a slimey pitch up the crumbly, wet gully). The first pitch in the gully required a pull-up over a large pile of overhanging loose rocks. Doug had his first fall of the day here. After a few swear words and the naming of Shit-gully, we found ourselves safely over the pile of hoverhanging rocks and below the second pile of over-hanging rocks. Round 2. Luckily there was a tree at the top of this one, which would be our safety line out of Shit-gully. I can’t say I was relieved to be back on the exposed ridge again, especially as there was no obvious way up. And even though we were a lot higher than what we were before the start of the gully, we were still not even halfway up.

Doug sent me around the corner to investigate a possible line up the front. This required me to scooch along a ledge on my hands and knees with the ridge hanging above me. When I saw the tiny grassy ledge and steep face on the other side it was “absolutely not” and i back-scooched my way along the ledge to the safety of Doug and our anchor. Doug obviously didn’t accept my defeat and he pranced along the ledge and started easily up the steep face.

We continued like this for a while - a combination of face and ridge climbing until we could see the top. The last little bit of ridge climbing was spectacular - with sheer drops down toward the highway, but easy enough not to be scary!

A mixture of celebration and relief when we got to the summit post, and then an easy jog down the Maanskynkop hiking trail back to the car as we watched the sun go down. A full sunrise to sunset kind of day!

Route stats:

• Roughly 12 pitches in total
• Grade 12-13 with the crux pitch maybe puahing grade 16
• 1000m elevation gain
• 14 hours round trip