Table Mountain dominates Cape Town's skyline and the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Mountain Range in KwaZulu Natal are the most well known to international tourists visiting South Africa. However, there are many other mountains that deserve any mountain lovers attention!
South Africa's topography is dominated by the great escapement that divides the country into two distinct sections -- the divide is a series of mountain ranges with the rivers of the eastern and southern slopes spilling their waters into the Indian Ocean and the rivers of the larger western plateau flowing into the atlantic.
Buckling after the split of Gondwana...
Stormberg Series...
Mountain Activities:
Hiking and mountain biking are the most popular adventure travel activities in South Africa's mountinous regions. Many of the hiking trails are also suitable for mountain biking.
One of South Africa's toughest Mountain Bike Races, the Cape Epic, a gruelling 760km long MTB race, traverses the Outiniqua and Swartberg Mountain Ranges. A far shorter but no less strenous mountain biking race is the Sani Pass Transfronteir MTB Epic which is located in the Southern Drakensberg of KwaZulu Natal.
The uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park has outstanding natural beauty, Africa's highest mountain range south of Kilimanjaro, a fascinating and ancient geology, some of the rarest animals in the world - and the largest, richest and most concentrated series of rock art in Africa. In 2000 it became the fourth site in South Africa to be granted World Heritage status by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).The imposing Drakensberg escarpment is the product of millions of years of sculpting by the elements, with its foundations formed over billions of years.
Eons ago, the place was an enormous inland lake, lying on the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland. Sediments carried into the lake were deposited on granite foundations, which formed almost three billion years ago. Today, in areas such as Wit Umfolozi, Old Baldy in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, and Kloof Gorge, small portions of these grandfather granites are exposed and visible.
The sediments of mud and sand were deposited for millions of years into the vast central swamp, home to dinosaurs. Compacted by the immense pressure of the overlying layers, they built up about 490 million years ago. Today the resultant sandstone can be seen in the typical table-top shapes of the Valley of a Thousand Hills and Oribi Gorge.
The next layer of sediments deposited over the Beaufort sandstones built up the blue and grey Molteno and red Elliot formations about 200 million years ago. These form the small cliffs in the Drakensberg foothills. The layer is easily recognised from the tiny quartz crystals that make it sparkle in the sun. Millennia later, the San used the even Molteno layers as a canvas for their art.
Some 160 million years ago, enormous internal pressures caused the supercontinent of Gondwanaland to crack and drift apart, forming the different continents we have today. Enormous cracks in the crust of the African continent caused massive lava flows, which were to create the Drakensberg.
The thick lavas flowed and cooled, flowed and cooled, adding up to 50 metres of lava at a time. Over 20-million years these flows built up a deposit of basaltic rock over 1.5 kilometres thick in some places, covering an area from Lesotho to most of KwaZulu-Natal and as far as Mozambique and the Indian Ocean.
The lava stopped flowing about 140-million years ago. Since then, erosion has been the dominant force in the mountains, forming the imposing peaks and steep-sided valleys we know today.
Through the centuries, the slow build-up of soil on the steep slopes has provided a base for vegetation, food for the vast herds of game that once roamed the grasslands. |
