I suppose winter isn’t really the time to get out and about, especially considering the conditions this past week, but we have a solid nine months of the year to make the most of the natural beauty that the Western Cape has to offer.

If you’re someone who climbs Table Mountain regularly you might recognise that image above – it’s the plaque commemorating the fallen members of The Mountain Club of South Africa in World War I.

As the date suggests it was placed there in 1922, and “maps out the 360° panorama that is seen from Maclear’s Beacon, the tallest point in the Cape Peninsula”.

That’s according to Conquer the Cape, an excellent blog by local hiking expert Matthew Sterne, who has this to add:

To the north lies the Cederberg, Groot Winterhoek and Hottentot Holland mountain ranges. To the south is an assortment of peaks within the Table Mountain National Park. There are 23 peaks featured on the memorial. The challenge? To climb them all.

The World War I Memorial Challenge is the creation of Des Deary [above], a local entrepreneur and avid hiker, who was searching for his next peak list when he happened to find exactly that on the old copper plate of the war memorial.

When Des saw the plaque, inspiration struck:

…”one day on Table Mountain I noticed the memorial plaque. It had the name of the peaks surrounding Table Mountain with their heights – the perfect peak list. It’s been there for almost one hundred years and I thought, wow this is really iconic and would be a really cool thing to tackle.” And thus, the challenge was born.

Here’s the bit that’s really cool – over on Peakery.com you can sign up as an official challenger, uploading your progress as you go. There are currently 28 people registered as trying to complete the 23 peak challenge, with Des leading the way on 13 successful summits.

That’s right, no one has yet completed the task – your chance to stake your claim to fame?

More on the plaque’s history via Conquer the Cape again:

It commemorates the nine Mountain Club members who died in the First World War. General Jan Smuts, the South African statesman, unveiled the memorial. Smuts, who was a keen mountaineer and had an abiding passion for Table Mountain (one of his favourite rambles was up Table Mountain along a route now known as Smuts’ Track), said in his address:

“To them, the true church where they worshipped was Table Mountain. Table Mountain was their cathedral where they heard a subtler music and saw wider visions and were inspired by a loftier spirit. Here in life, they breathed the great air; here in death their memory will fill the upper spaces. And it is fitting that in this cathedral of Table Mountain the lasting memorial of their great sacrifice should be placed. Not down there in the glowing and rich plains, but up here in the bleak and cold mountaintops. As Browning put it: Here, here’s their place; where meteors shoot; clouds form; lightnings are loosened; stars come and go.”

Who’s keen to stuff the backpack with some dried fruit, biltong and speckled eggs (a must)? If you err on the side of adventure, this is one you might want to chuck on the bucket list.

For more info on this hike, and others in and around Cape Town, check out the rest of that blog HERE.

[source:conquerthecape]