Rock climbing booming at Spitzkoppe

Adventure sports are booming all over the world and Namibia, with its vast open spaces and natural beauty, is becoming an increasingly popular spot for adventure tourists from abroad.

Sports like skydiving, dune biking, dune skiing and mountain bike tours have been around for a while, but rock climbing is quickly starting to rival them as an outdoor adventure activity.

Rock climbing (along with indoor rock climbing) is one of the fastest growing sports in the world and Namibia’s magical Spitzkoppe mountain is becoming a prime spot for climbers from all over the world. Rising up about 700m above the flat desert floor it towers above the surrounding plains, providing climbers with stunning views and an enriching, nearly spiritual, experience, and now some Namibians are starting to tap into the vast potential that it has to offer.

A young Namibian mountain climber, Friedrich Setzkorn, took up the sport about four years ago, and immediately became hooked. He joined the Namibian Mountain Climbing Club and went on regular excursions up Spitzkoppe.

Two years ago he decided to take a leap into the unknown and turn his passion into a business. He formed Climbaway Adventures and started taking tourists on climbs up the mountain. Business has boomed since then, he says.

“It’s hard to say how many rock climbers I have taken, because the group sizes vary, and I don’t really keep track, but I’ve seen a big difference from last year to this year. Last year I would say I had about one or two trips per month, and each group would vary between two to six people. But this year it has exploded and over the past three or four months I’ve had a trip pretty much every week,” he says.

“Sometimes I get bigger groups of up to ten people, but sometimes its just one or two people,” he adds.

Setzkorn has now done countless tours, but he never tires of it.

“It never gets old or boring. It’s so much fun to go out each time and even though I’ve gotten very used to the routes that I take them on, it’s always as if I’m doing it for the first time, because each trip is unique and it’s very rewarding seeing them having a thrill on it,” he says.

Most of these climbers, however, do smaller routes with only about 20% of them summitting the peak. For this, climbers need specialised climbing gear and Setzkorn has learnt that he also needs to assess their climbing skills before he takes them to the top.

“My second time summitting, before I was a certified guide, I took a group of American climbers and one of them was pretty experienced, and a strong climber. He was supposed to lead us up, but when we reached the rock climbing section near the top, he freaked out. His mind shut down and he got stuck and didn’t want to go further. He wasn’t thinking clearly, and he also started dropping gear.

“I went up and talked to him, took over and eventually managed to get us to the top and back down, but it took very long – it’s normally about a 10-hour trip, but that trip took 24 hours,” he says.

Setzkorn adds that it is not for the faint-hearted and even an experienced climber like himself still finds it scary.

“Coming down, there are three areas where you abseil, and on the middle part there’s a section where you swing out over the edge, where you literally have a dead drop all the way to the bottom. When you swing over that edge, it’s very scary,” he says.

Another rock climber, Richard Morsbach has also started a rock climbing company called Namib Adventure. Setzkorn adds that there is huge potential for rock climbing in other parts of Namibia.

“Waterberg has great potential but we don’t have proper access to it yet. I’ve been talking to the ministry of environment to try and get access,” he says.

“Another place that is quite unique is Lake Guinas near Tsumeb. It’s a really cool place for climbing and it’s what we call deep water soloing, which is a version of climbing where you don’t use any gear – you just climb and when you fall off the rock, you fall into the water. Thus far it has mainly been a fun thing we do now and then, but I’m actually doing my first tour there this coming month,” he says.

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