A group of Oldenburgia Hiking Club members, joined by volunteers, braved the cold, wet weather last weekend to re-establish the Oldenburgia hiking trail in Featherstone Kloof, behind Mountain Drive.
A group of Oldenburgia Hiking Club members, joined by volunteers, braved the cold, wet weather last weekend to re-establish the Oldenburgia hiking trail in Featherstone Kloof, behind Mountain Drive.
The club has taken the initiative to re-mark the old trail as it had become overgrown and neglected over the years. Club members Roger Rowswell, Brian Bannatyne, Pauline Meyer and Jonathan Campbell and a group of volunteers went to the starting point of the trail Sunday 24 August to search for flat rocks on the trail.
They cleaned and marked the rocks with white paint using the stencil of a shoe print to indicate the direction of the path.
“The two-day Oldenburgia trail to Thomas Baines has been discontinued,” said Rowswell who originally established the route with Kevin Bates of the Municpal Parks Department in the late '90s.
Bannatyne said the original route had to be changed because of farmers’ concerns about stock theft and hunting that takes place on some of the game farms along the trail. Alien plants, such as bracken and brambles, are another problem.
Working for Water, an initiative led by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, had cleared the area of invasive aliens, but they sprang up again.
Hikers use available sections of the commonage to create different routes for shorter day walks that link up to the original trail.
“We use the current trail that we have to make different day hikes and loops,” Rowswell said.
Rowswell is making a map of the different routes available for hikers in the area. Sunday's works was, unfortunately, halted by rain, but the member said they would continue to mark the new routes.
Roswell said volunteers are welcome to join the club, which usually goes out on Sundays. Both the trail and the hiking club are named after a threatened species, Oldenburgia grandis – a small, gnarled tree in the family Asteraceae that grows exclusively in the mountains around Grahamstown.
You can recognise it by its dark-green leathery leaves covered in soft white down. Oldenburgia grows to a height of about 5m on rocky outcrops on the hillside and in the valley behind Mountain Drive.
It is threatened by habitat loss.
