Trencher's Cave

Mist rising in the Berg. Photo by Tony Marshall

Trencher’s Cave

All the older maps, including the official 1:50 000 topo series, mark “Trencher’s Cave” as a cave high up near the summit of Cathedral Peak. But where is Trencher’s Cave? The only coordinates ever published for the cave have been interpolated from that map – not from an actual gps reading taken by someone standing at the site. There is no mention of Trencher’s Cave in ‘Barrier of the Spears’ or any of the other many books about the Berg. 

Maybe an exhaustive search of the MCSA journals might bring up something interesting, but unless it’s a recent article it’s unlikely to include any coordinates.

Which poses a dilemma. There is the name, marked on the maps. Your party has climbed up from the hotel, and here you are, near the summit, the mountains falling steeply away on all sides. The sun is setting and the temperature has plummeted; there is mist rising from the valleys below, and the forecast suggests sleety rain, maybe even snow, during the moonless night ahead. 

The map promises Trencher’s Cave, somewhere up ahead in the gathering dark. You pull out your track finder, but wait ... the map has no coordinates! Where is the cave? Will we find it in the dark? 

Of course not. And unless we have coordinates we won’t be showing Trencher’s Cave on the new maps, either. Who knows whether it actually exists at all?  For safety’s sake, when in doubt, leave it out. 

We’re starting to feel that the same surely applies to the many paths that have simply faded away in the long Berg grass, or got lost in the shrubbery. Is there any sense in showing where a path might once have gone, sad as its demise might be? The old maps are not a reliable guide, either. The official maps – the Surveyor General’s maps as they are known to some – have some terrible errors, like a fictional Bell Cave some 600 metres north of Cathedral Peak, and 600 metres down below some pretty awesome cliffs. If you choose that mythical cave for the night you’re dead.

The old Slingsby series had several bad bloopers, where lack of research time meant relying on the memory of a forester or a Parks ranger – fatal! Back in the 80s the only single official we ever met who could sketch a path accurately on to a map while sitting at his office desk was Bill Small, legendary Cobham forester. No one else ever came close. 

The six Slingsby maps probably involved a total of something like three month’s field research, in two-week sessions spread over six or seven years. I worked with Theuns van Rensburg, a fine man and good friend, and we occasionally had other friends – Theuns’s son Leo, Geoff Ward, Tony Rebelo, Barry Coombe, Charl Samuels. And Bill Small and Dave Osborne of Monk’s Cowl, who were the only officials in the entire Forestry or NPB establishment who – literally – ever took a step out with us on to the footpaths of the Berg to help. Lots of moral support from George Hughes, Director of the NPB, who kept in daily touch with our progress whenever he could ... but we could hardly expect the Director to spend nights in caves with us! Bill Barnes too lent a lot of moral support, and there were some very helpful people at the inevitable meetings ... but I digress.

The EKZNW series came next. Some of its errors were bloopers copied from the those on the Slingsby series [not checked, mind you, simply copied], but a large number are certainly not. There are fictional paths that differ radically from the accurate paths on the Slingsbys ... there are some paths there that disappear over the edge of the cave sandstone and vanish into space, figments of an imagination somewhere. I think we have to try for something a lot better than that, and I think with the absolutely fantastic amount of help that has already come in from private Berg climbers and hikers we can achieve that.

Who knows, we might even find Trencher’s Cave.