Rock stars of Rocklands

WINTER brings snow to the Cederberg, and it also brings  young men with the physiques of gods who abuse themselves with sandpaper.  They are everywhere, staring transfixed at the ochre rocks, then painstakingly cleaning away any loose grit with toothbrushes like acolytes dusting an image of the Buddha.

They are here, in their hundreds, for the arcane ritual of bouldering. This is climbing distilled to its purest essence: human skill versus the rock, without ropes or helmets or harnesses. A boulderer’s only equipment is a pair of special shoes that fit so tightly they feel like the bandages Oriental women wrap their feet in to keep them tiny, a thick foam pad to break the inevitable fall, chalk powder, and a toothbrush. Oh, and sandpaper.

“Most climbers will have a piece in their pockets,” says Steve Bradshaw, pulling out his to demonstrate. He rubs at his index finger like a craftsman shaping a wooden spoon, then offers it up for inspection: the tip is a fragile raw pink that makes you shudder in sympathetic pain.

It’s a kind of first aid — because the rocks are so abrasive, climbers are always cutting or grazing their fingers. But they don’t want ridges of scar tissue to form. “You sand down the edges of cuts,” Bradshaw explains.  “It feels much better if you can sand it away until it’s just one big area of weakness.”

Cape Town-born Bradshaw  now lives in the US.  At 32, he is a veteran compared with his climbing buddy Win Fineron, who is “nearly 19” and came to climb in the Cederberg from his home in New Zealand. “The skin on your finger starts to roll up,” Fineron elaborates. “Or you get loose bits of skin hanging off, they can get caught and rip.”

Boulderers can’t wear gloves, because they would lose crucial sensitivity in their fingertips, as well as the friction between skin and rock that helps them to defy gravity.

“With gloves or tape you can’t feel what you’re holding or how you’re holding it,” says Fineron. “You have to make sure you grab the rock in the perfect spot, otherwise you might just slide off. We get very finicky about how we do things.”

How they do things is to roam a rugged  area  near Clanwilliam which has come to be called Rocklands and look for amenable boulders, which due to a fortuitous accident of ancient geology happen to be lined up cheek-by-jowl here. They look for indentations or cracks  that will offer hand-holds and toe-holds, then try to climb the “line” these holds present. Usually the climb will start at ground level, and won’t go any higher than 3m, although some lines involve hanging upside down. Thus the thick foam “crash pads”.

For several years now enthusiasts from around the world have been flocking to these boulders in the winter. In summer, their fingers sweat too much and they can’t climb.

The climbers come for two or three months at a stretch, and to conserve their meagre cash — they have just spent R2,500 on a pair of uncomfortable climbing shoes — they camp out on nearby farms and eat pasta from the local SuperSpar. But the sport’s popularity is meteoric rising meteorically, and some of the top climbers are paid by sponsors like outdoor clothing companies or shoe brands.

One such semi-professional is Alex Megos, 21, from Germany, whom Bradshaw casually refers to as “probably the best climber in the world”.  If he is the best, like all the other climbers at Rocklands, it doesn’t show in his ego.

“It’s just the best sport,” Megos says. “You can do it everywhere in the world, and I think that’s why it’s so addictive. It’s not just about the climbing. It’s more like the lifestyle. It’s the package, you go there to have a nice time with your friends, climbing some nice rock.”

When they’re not climbing in the real world, boulderers train on climbing walls in gyms. Their bodies are lithe, well-muscled and entirely fat free. “The ideal climber’s body is like a triangle,” says Fineron. “Their legs are really skinny, and they have big wide shoulders.”

And they do a lot of finger-strength training. “It’s 90% in your fingers,” says Bradshaw.  “Mainly it’s an anaerobic sport, you don’t need much cardio.  you don’t need to be that fit. It’s better to start skinny and build the muscles you want. A lot of muscular guys who do weightlifting, they can’t hold their weight, they’re too heavy.”

Although most of the climbers at Rocklands are men, bouldering has about zero macho-jock content.

“You’re not trying to prove to anyone that you’ve done anything,” says Fineron. “It’s just: you climb, you move on, you climb the next thing; if you feel like sharing it with other people, you do. There’s no rules, no competition with others. It’s just you. Once you start doing it, and you start to improve, it becomes the main thing you want to do, always.”

Bradshaw calls it a very “objective-focused” sport. “You can’t bullshit; you either can do it or you can’t,” he says. “It’s not like surfing, where you can say, ‘Yeah, had a good day out there,’ and build a narrative; you either did it or you didn’t.  But because of that, when you succeed, that achievement is literally  set in stone, it’s always going to be there.”

There’s more to it than muscle. Climbers speak of the boulders and their lines in mystical terms.

“Every climber has a  different kind of view of what looks good and what doesn’t,” says Fineron. “You look for your golden line, I guess.”

Lucas Tubiana,  a psychology student from France, describes bouldering as a kind of choreography. “We develop a line not just because it’s hard, or because it’s there, but because it’s a nice line. Like Shosholoza, for example, the rock is beautiful, the rock is a master.”

Each line has a name. Shosholoza, Fineron agrees, is “almost perfect”. “It’s a free-standing egg-shaped boulder kind of balancing there, with just enough holds to make it possible.”

The young men who named some of the climbs apparently had curves, rather than lines, on their minds. One is called “Minki”, after the leggy Ms Van der Westhuizen. Nearby, another climb is called “Who the Fuck is Minki?”

Mood and concentration are essential ingredients for success. If you think about falling while you’re clinging to a boulder, you almost certainly will. Tubiana  admits he is not as strong a climber as Bradshaw or Fineron or Megos; he does not say this, but thinking too much might be his problem.

“We’re not doing it because it’s easy, we climb because it’s hard,” he says. “I think we are fighting something like the emptiness inside us. We are also facing the largest force in creation, gravity. Gravity makes this stuff harder, but we need gravity otherwise we couldn’t climb, we would fly.”

It’s very psychological, he says. Climbing makes you see the world differently. “Show a painter a rock and he will see a painting; a soldier will see something to pass over; the climber will see a beautiful line.  It’s like, what’s possible, what’s not possible. I like climbing for all these complex and absurd aspects.”

Little wonder, perhaps, that Tubiana sometimes falls.