“Abseiling? What is abseiling?” Perusing a rack of brochures and flyers in the lobby of a Cape Town, South Africa hotel back in September 2016, my friend Greg and I had to look the word up online to discover that this is the word a lot of the world uses to describe what we in America usually know as rappelling. “The World’s Highest Commercial Abseil” said the brochure for Abseil Africa, the company offering a 110-meter (340-foot) descent off of one of the numerous sheer cliffs flanking Table Mountain, the landmark wonder that overlooks the 3.5 million residents of Cape Town. At 995 rand (about $75) per person, Greg and I decided that maybe we didn’t want to spend the money after all…. but Greg’s wife Carol said, “I think you should do it. You aren’t going to come back anytime soon, and won’t the memory be worth the price?” Flawless logic, Carol. Yes, in fact we should pay $75 to drop off of the cliff. The Facebook and blog posts alone are worth the money!

This is the building that houses the machinery which hauls the two cable cars (also known as funiculars, another word that in the past I had to look up the meaning of) from the base of Table Mountain up to the top at about 3530 feet (1080 meters) elevation.

We had the hotel concierge call and make arrangements with Abseil Africa, confirming that there would indeed be the opportunity to make the rappel the next day. Rappelling off of Table Mountain is subject to good weather, and can be shut down without much notice if it becomes too windy, cold, or rainy. Fortunately the forecast for Table Mountain looked promising on this day of the spring equinox on September 21, 2016. We could not have ordered better weather, with moderate temperatures and light winds, which can often be fierce up at the summit of Table Mountain, and set our appointment time for 9:30 AM.

Carol and Greg (center) emerge from the cable car building after a short, 4-minute ride from the base station to the summit in which you gain over 2500 feet of elevation very rapidly. Table Mountain can be very crowded since it’s one of the premier attractions of the city of Cape Town, and dozens of languages are heard to be spoken from the multitudes of international tourists.

The view to the northeast off of Table Mountain, with Cape Town sprawling below.

Abseil Africa operates less than 100 meters to the right from the upper station where most people disembark from and enter the funicular. A few hard-core hikers make the steep, miles-long trek on foot using trails, but the majority of people use the funicular service. No roads lead to the summit of Table Mountain, due both to the sheer steepness of the terrain and also to the fact that it is an important nature reserve and National Park.

Our abseiling guide (in black) processes our payments via credit cards before we are given our gear and a basic level of instruction on how to proceed. No prior abseiling experience is required, and the double-roped descent procedures make this a fairly safe journey since the guides up top always have you on belay with a second rope in case something goes wrong.

The entire rappelling experience takes most people about 45 minutes to an hour, once they start to descend. That includes the time spent to get down the cliffs, and the hike back up to the summit. Below, our guide observes the progress of the woman who went down before us. We will obviously not be allowed to clip into the harnesses and ropes before she is done, so we had to wait a few minutes until the other guides at the bottom gave the all-clear signal.

Camp’s Bay, on the west side of the Cape Peninsula, sits below the summit of Table Mountain. Views of the mountain massif and ocean from Camp’s Bay are stunning, making it one of the most desirable places to live in Cape Town.

Let’s back up just a little for a moment…. This was not my first rappelling experience, actually. I’ve had another, which occurred back in Boulder, Colorado, where I grew up. The year would probably have been somewhere around 1987 or 1988, and Jeff, one of my childhood friends who had gotten seriously into rock climbing, coaxed me into climbing the Third Flatiron above Boulder, one of 5 enormous tilted red sandstone blocks set on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The Flatirons are by far the most visible geological formations of the mountains near Boulder, are the signature scenic feature of the city and region, and are known worldwide in climbing circles.

The Third Flatiron is a giant slab of stratified sandstone tilted at about 45 to 50 degrees on its triangular east face, and has several cliffs on the west face, most of which are about 80 to 100 feet high. Free climbing the east face is possible (not necessarily recommended, but possible), but Jeff and I used ropes just to be safe. We would need those ropes to come off of the back side anyway.

I had thought that rappelling sounded fun, and Jeff was an enthusiastic advocate of the activity. However looking over the back edge of the Third Flatiron after our ascent, I suddenly was seized by anxiety unlike any I’d faced before in my life. I was roped up and clipped in, with Jeff holding me on belay, standing on the brink, feeling peer pressure to back over the edge in a fashion most utterly unnatural. This is something we do not do as humans. Evolution has drummed into us a healthy fear of heights, because after all, we do not have wings, and falling from them usually proves fatal. Nothing, nothing at all, felt right about this. The rope I was on seemed like a fragile filament, and worst of all I had to lean backwards and edge over the cliff in reverse, which while obviously the best way to maintain control and see where to place your feet, felt deeply wrong.

Long story short, it took everything I had to back over the cliff and make my way down the Third Flatiron. I underestimated how draining the experience would be for me by easily an order of magnitude. At times I felt barely able to maintain my hold on the rope, despite my white-knuckled death grip and every muscle in my body tensed to the max. Jeff wanted me to jump free and clear into the air and relax the rope so that I could sail down in large bounds. Screw you Jeff. Nope. I am going down this cliff inch by inch until I am on solid, not-vertical ground again.

Eventually I reached the cliff base and collapsed into a weak pile of gelatin. Jeff descended the rappel within roughly 30 seconds what had taken me about 5 minutes, and he was elated while I was merely spent. I had almost nothing left inside and it took me almost 5 minutes of shaking on the ground with my eyes closed before I could summon the energy to stand and hike back down the canyon. I remember getting home and falling into bed and sleeping for several hours that afternoon and evening. Emotionally I had not expected to be so exhausted by the experience, and I decided then and there that rappelling was not for me. I was not going to do it again.

Until this.

I have no good explanation for what changed in Cape Town that day before when I decided to not only go rappelling again, but to do so off of a cliff three times taller than the one I did back in Boulder 30 years before. And not only that, but I was going to be paying for the privilege, whereas the Third Flatiron was free. Maybe it was the name change from rappelling to abseiling?

In the above photo, the Abseil Africa guide was encouraging me to stand up and lean backwards, allowing the rope to support my weight. Carol was taking the photos with my camera, which I had handed off to her. I had thought about taking the camera with me but figured that I was pretty unlikely to be able to use it, as doing so would have required me to let at least one hand be free of the rope. I doubted my capacity to do this, which ended up being correct. Besides, the scenery isn’t appreciably different from the top than from the cliff face, and what was the point of taking a photo of a rock face that wouldn’t have shown any context of where I was anyway? In the hands of Carol, I got better photos of me from the summit preparing to go over than I would have taken of myself en route.

Still, you can see the semi-petrification in my face and posture. I just couldn’t really make myself lean backwards, even though without that rope, I’d have gone over the cliff backwards in that position anyway. 😉

Greg didn’t have my issues with leaning backwards onto the rope without any hands. I did.

Nope! I just can’t really let go! I have to cling to the rope with at least one hand. No point in taking the camera, although by this point is was getting kinda late to change my mind even if I’d wanted to.

The first drop off of the cliff is a relatively short one of under 10 meters, at which point you land on a small rock shelf a couple of meters wide. I don’t know if this is where a certain proportion of Abseil Africa clients freak out and decide to abandon ship and climb back up, but one thing is certain: Beyond this, once you are over the main cliff, and you’re going the rest of the way. No turning back after this initial resting spot.

Greg is much faster than me. He went down that 30 foot drop in like 20 seconds in big leaps. I repeated my face-crawl inch by inch from Boulder. I’m still chicken and it still felt totally unnatural to me to back over that damn cliff face in reverse. So sue me.

Eventually I made it down to the upper ledge, and basically thought, “I’m doing this. I signed up for this and I am going to finish it.” Greg was eager to get moving, and he was always ahead of my slow ass.

There is really no perspective here, as there seldom is for flat, two-dimensional photos. The upper parts of Table Mountain drop off well over a thousand vertical feet in almost no lateral distance, much like the Grand Canyon or Zion or Yosemite National Parks in the USA do.

This was the final photo of me and Greg as we descended down the cliff face. Only 300 or so more feet to go to the bottom. You can see the access trail that we will use to climb back up to the summit snaking along the shelf below us, and it’s way farther than it looks from the flattened perspective of a 2D photograph. Meanwhile, our Abseil Africa guide called out to us, “Enjoy the surprise!” as we went over the edge.

SURPRISE? WTF do you mean “SURPRISE” ?!?

So here’s the surprise: About halfway down the rock face, you come to a large overhang. You just step off of it and dangle from your rope like a giant spider on a silk thread. There’s literally nothing you can do about this fact, as climbing back up is impossible (especially if you are a novice, and even if you had the upper body strength) so you just have to continue down.

Had I known about this overhang and the 150-plus feet of free air I would be experiencing, I might have reconsidered my desire to abseil, rappel, whatever you prefer to call it. I think Abseil Africa knows this and therefore does not promote it as part of their literature packet. Thanks guys.

A few words on what I was experiencing on my paid-for self-torture episode. First of all, Table Mountain is windy, and is known for that fact. Today it was not windy. Not even breezy. It was however cool and shady as we made our descent down the cliff face. So that meant my chilly sunglasses fogged up from my intense sweating and there was no breeze to help evaporate the condensation. Perspiration was dripping down my forehead and into my eyes, stinging them and making them water, so in between that and the fogging of my glasses I couldn’t see very much. Meanwhile I couldn’t wipe my eyes because I had to keep both hands on my rope to stop myself from descending faster than I wanted to, and my helmet and chin straps would have prevented me from taking off my sunglasses anyway even if I’d had a free hand. Thus, I descended the cliff face half blind from sweat and foggy glasses. Good thing I didn’t bother taking a camera because I couldn’t have used it anyway.

The graphic below shows the descent pattern after the overhang. The dotted line indicates the approximate free-hanging portion of the rappel, the yellow arrows indicate cliff faces where your feet were in contact with the rocks, and the blue arrows indicate the landing spot and the direction where you hike out to get back to the summit via a trail.

In addition to the foggy glasses and dripping sweat, there was a whole host of other physiological processes happening with me. As noted before, I couldn’t let go of the rope with either hand, and I reflexively clung to it with a death grip that was irrational since the rope had me regardless of whether I rubbed my fingers raw or not. Every muscle in my upper body from waist to neck and face was clenched to the point of fatigue, a thing I simply couldn’t control on my second rappel any more than I could on my first.

When I stepped off the upper ledge at the very top to do the main pitch of the rappel, I couldn’t look down. I’m normally not paranoid about heights on solid ground, but obviously I wasn’t so I reacted differently than I ordinarily would. My brain was focused not on the striking views, but upon the rock face in front of me, because it felt tangible and safe and distracted me from the void below.

Greg was beside me and slightly below, and we talked, mostly in short bursts of inarticulate expletive-laden invective related to the situation we were in, but that helped center my thinking to the task at hand. Until we saw the cliff face fall away from us. I didn’t see it coming until it was a few feet beneath me because of the foggy glasses, watery eyes, and laser focus on the rocks in front of me. But when I did, I thought, “So this was the surprise, huh? Nice.”

My second thought, however, was, “There’s nothing you can do about it, so deal with the hanging. The rope already is carrying your entire weight, so it’s not like anything has really changed just because now the cliff is 20 feet away over there. Just make your descent, nice and slow. It’s almost over.”

One discomfiting fact of this abseil was the fact that no matter what I did, I could not fully stop my gravity-aided descent on the rope. They way it is supposed to operate is that you have the rope threaded through some sort of a metal buckle that creates a lot of friction when you angle the rope underneath you in a certain way. In fact, controlling the rope with one hand is supposed to entirely stop your downward motion, so that if you want to just hang there and use your theoretically free hand to wipe your eyes and defog your glasses, for example, that you could do so.

When you angle the rope through the buckle another way, you are supposed to slip much more freely down the rope, and maybe, if you are courageous or dumb enough, to do jumps and become temporarily airborne like Jeff did on the Third Flatiron. That felt totally out of control to me and was well beyond what I felt willing to do, but in order to descend at a reasonable pace you need to do some sort of angle in between such that you essentially clamber backwards down the cliff, with your feet on the rock, stepping backwards one foot at a time. That’s how one way or another, gracefully or clumsily, you make your way through an abseil.

Unfortunately I never was able to fully arrest my descent no matter what sharp angle the rope was at. Granted, the descent was slow, only about an inch per second, but it never stopped and as such I never got to just hang quietly for a short while to relax, catch my breath, and maybe wipe my damn stinging eyes.

At any rate, I eventually made it down the cliff and landed at the designated spot where a second Abseil Africa guide was waiting to help unclip us from our harnesses and send us on our way to hike back out. This time, while I was tired from the much longer rappel than the one I had done 30 years prior, I did not feel nearly as emotionally wrecked as I had the first time. I was able to stand up normally after only a minute and the hike out was fine even though it was along a steep cliff face of its own, and uphill. The exhilaration of having done the abseil despite my decades-long conviction never to do it again felt like a peculiar type of reward in its own right. We spent the rest of the day up on Table Mountain looking at and photographing the diverse and interesting flora found there and the magnificent, world-class views. Views that were way better than from the rope, when I couldn’t really see or appreciate them.

Would I do it again? I might SURPRISE! myself.

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Here’s a picture of the western face of Table Mountain, taken late that afternoon after we had come off of the summit, from Camp’s Bay where we took a City Tour scenic bus ride to get back to our hotel. You can see a cable car arriving at the top. The rappelling route is shown too, with red arrows indicating the starting point and how we went down the cliff, the yellow arrows showing the hiking trail over to a steep ravine, and the orange arrows indicating the return hiking trail along the rim back to our starting point. I’ll cover the scenic and floristic aspects of Table Mountain in different posts some other time.

The Table Mountain funicular arriving at the summit, as seen from Camp’s Bay in late afternoon.

Last photo: The funicular cables as seen from the base station after we got back down the mountain late in the afternoon. Even if you don’t decide to go rappelling, Table Mountain is a place everyone should go at least once when in Cape Town, a world-class city in its own right.