Spitzkoppe

The next party – O'Neil, Shipley and Schaff – pioneered a route up the northern extremes of the peak, after having failed on the southwest ridge.

Some of the earliest climbers, defeated by an extraordinarily smooth band of granite only about 3m high, resorted to carving steps into the rock with a hammer and chisel.

A few months later Hans and Else Wong and Jannie de Villiers Graaff arrived and they reached the summit at noon, in November 1946.

This era came to an end in 1971, when the peak was climbed in four hours by a party led by J. W. Marchant from the University of Cape Town Mountain and Ski Club.

C. Edelstein and G. Mallory left their mark in 1983 by completing "Royale Flush", another monster route that was freed only in 2000 by J. Wamsteker and S. Wallis.

In 1896, a trading post named Spitzkopje was built below the mountain by the German Colonial Society, the centrepiece of a 120,000-hectare farm.

In 1899 the farm held 120 horses, 1,500 cattle and 4,000 sheep and goats; its manager was a German settler named Carl Schlettwein.

This represents about half of the camping places which ceased to exist, access to many climbing rocks and also the normal route to the Great Spitzkoppe barred.

"Bushman Paradise" made accessible through a gate with chains, has lost its attractiveness, as almost all of the 2000- to 4000-year-old prehistoric rock paintings have been destroyed.