Why use a guide

Qualified & Experienced Mountain Guides

The advantages go beyond mere route-finding and weather-prediction. A mountain guide will optimize your experience of the mountain by ensuring you get to see the best there is to see within your fitness and experience level.

Table Mountain is not to be trifled with. For all its beauty and grandeur, it claims several lives each year. Many more hurt themselves or suffer all manner of ordeals. Most people grossly underestimate the mountain, thinking it to be tame – a misconception rooted in the proximity of the city and the presence of a cableway. Making use of a guide gives you peace of mind, allowing you to fully savour the experience.

Cape Town’s famous rock is much bigger than it appears from below. Also, the terrain is more treacherous and unforgiving than the slopes and shapely buttresses lead you to believe. A network of trails crisscross the mountain, some used by climbers to access the base of a cliff, others involving challenging scrambling over big drops. Just because a trail starts out as a walk does not mean it remains pedestrian all the way to the summit. Most Table Mountain routes involves some degree of scrambling and exposure to heights: starting out gently, they become more challenging further up. A guide takes the risk and guesswork out of the hike, thereby ensuring a safe and enjoyable experience. 

Another factor that impacts on mountain safety is weather. Table Mountain generates micro-climates that are notoriously unpredictable. Hikers often get lost when cloud engulfs the mountain. Table Mountain gets a lot of cloud, and conditions can change from blue skies to zero visibility within minutes.  Gale-force winds blow up from nowhere, shutting the cableway and necessitating a hike-down: gruelling to inexperienced hikers. Suffice to say that the mountain does not suffer fools gladly. 

In light of all this, using an experienced mountain guide makes a lot of sense. But the advantages extend beyond route finding and weather prediction. A guide worth his or her salt will optimize your experience of the mountain in the following ways:

Why do you need a guide to hike Table Mountain?

• Ensure your safety and well-being
• Get you to see the best there is to see within your abilities
• Provide an authentic and exhilarating experience
• Share unique insights and esoteric information about the mountain
• Discourse on the mountain’s fascinating fauna, flora, history and geology

Visitors to the Mother City do hike up on their own, sure, but apart from the risk they assume, they also rob themselves of a superior experience of the mountain. Our own research into people who hiked up without a guide revealed that they often wasted valuable time and energy looking for the route, or spent much of the hike worrying whether they were on the right trail. They topped out having learned nothing of the environment, and often miss out on dramatic viewpoints as well as hidden topographical gems.