Spitzkoppe, north-west side

Sixteen years for a lodge, three hours for 400 feet

I.C. Smith thought Gross Spitzkoppe looked like a giant elephant tusk, and wrote that it was not one of the friendly mountains. He was in the Cape Town party, led by Servie le Roux, that made the first recorded attempt in 1940. They got to within a few hundred feet of the top on the south ridge, where a deep cleft and a smooth block they called the Gendarme stopped them. Climbers from Swakopmund did no better on the same line in 1945.

The north side is where it was finally climbed

In July 1946 three more Capetonians, Les Schaff, Shippy Shipley and Peggy O’Neill, reached the Gendarme, gave up on it and went round to the north side, which looked worse and turned out better. Chimneys took them high before about nine metres of steep, holdless granite ended the day. They went to Usakos, borrowed a hammer and a cold chisel, and came back four days later to cut holds, which is where the steps on our Spitzkoppe page come from. On the way up an abseil rope snapped and Shipley fell nine or ten metres to a ledge. A patch of grass saved him. The other two chiselled on until the weather turned overnight, and they went home with a few metres of the slab still uncut.

That November Hans and Else Wongtschowski arrived with an 18-year-old, Jannie de Villiers Graaff. They sat out two hours of wind before trying to add one more step, and all the effort left little more than a scratch on the rock. They were on top at noon, the last 400 feet having taken three hours. Graaff was a baronet’s son. He went on to write a book on welfare economics that was reprinted six times in ten years, and in 1952 made two first ascents in the Indian Himalaya.

There is a metal box with a book in it on the summit now, and by 2009 the count of ascents had reached about 600. On 27 August 2010 four men from the Kavango who worked on a grape farm at Aussenkehr, Aron Muhoko, Muhuli Mbanje, Nyanda Kampasi and Bethold Muronga, left in the dark at five and, like Graaff, got there at noon. The Namibian’s report added that the only black Namibians up before them were two Damara men from the community at the foot of the mountain.

Kubrick’s apes never came here

The opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey looks like this country, and it is, but only as a photograph. Andrew Birkin, a young assistant promoted to the special effects team, supervised the shooting of the background plates in the Namib in 1967. They were used as 8 by 10 inch transparencies and thrown onto a reflective screen 40 feet high and 110 feet wide in a studio at Borehamwood, with the actors in ape suits in front.

The film that did turn up in person was Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 BC. It shot on the northern side of the mountain in 2006, with the production’s dates running from 19 July to 10 September. The first press statement said Spitzkoppe and three other sights near the coast would be off limits for all of that time. One tour agent called it “totally unreal” in the middle of peak season. A few days later the film people explained that only one area on the north side was involved. The production gave the community N$486,000. By February 2007 Chief Immanuel /Gaseb was demanding receipts, saying two meetings had produced only bank statements.

Why the lodge took so long

A lodge on this side was first planned around 2000. By 2004 one proposal had already been thrown out for intruding on archaeological remains, and the restoration plan drawn up that year for the paintings wanted camping spots moved away from them and any track that came within 100 metres closed. The heritage council later gave the lodge the same figure: find a site 100 metres from the art. In December 2008 The Namibian reported twelve bungalows, opening by the end of 2009. Two years on, the conservancy chairman Ryan Gariseb was complaining that people were still waiting for the jobs. By 2012 the talk was of twenty chalets.

It opened in November 2016 with fifteen. Ronnie Barnard, the architect, was already its project manager in 2008, and the long argument shows in the design: limited concrete, floors and decks raised off the ground, walls made to be taken apart, and power brought in on 5.5 km of buried cable. There is no air conditioning.

Zebra most days, a leopard almost never

Nobody should book this side for game. Expert Africa has collected sightings from its travellers at the lodge since mid-2018: 97 in 100 saw zebra, about one in ten saw oryx, and one in 25 a leopard. A photographer writing for Tracks4Africa calls his one leopard among the rocks a once in a lifetime sighting. His useful point is that the animals here are not used to people and keep their distance. One climbing party in June 2023 shared its campsite with a genet.

Birders come for the Herero chat, a bird science only named in 1931, from a specimen taken at Karibib, in the same region. It drops on ants, termites and beetles from shady perches on rocky hills with scattered trees, which describes the foot of these domes exactly. Finding it is another matter. One birder who wrote up a visit in 2025 searched for three days and left without it.

Rain changes the place. In February 2011 the hollows in the granite filled with clear water and children from the settlement were playing in them. By May 2019 a farmer there told The Namibian her herd of more than 100 goats was down to ten.

One warning comes from a single overlander on the 4x4 Community forum, who likes to sleep out on the rock: it is easy to get lost wandering among the boulders, at night most of all. That party had no handheld GPS, and the post says next time they will bring one and mark the camp.