Lion's Head

For the last two weeks, we all have been looking at the predominate feature in Cape Town - Table Mountain and Lion's Head.  This mountain range has shown up in many of my photos to date. With today being our first real day off, many of the Fellows wanted to get out and about.  One group headed up country towards the wine country for an overnight. One group set out to hike Table Mountain.  Our group (Kevin, Vernon, Subina, Katie and I) headed towards Lion's Head, with our Tour Guide - Leon - at the helm.

The trail head ...

Where we are heading to.  The tippy top. As Leon, the tour guide calls it, the tip of the pimple.

And THAT is a higly flattering photo of me climbing up the first set of ladders.  There were two more, and a set of cable to climb.  Now, most of  you know I am a pretty good hiker, but what you can't see is the sheer dropoff from this point.

I actually got to about 95% of the way to the top when the height got to me and I decided to let the group go ahead and just sit and wait for them. 

This is the view down into the valley, taken form the place I waitied for my group to come back down.

The peak of Lion's Head is 2,195 meters about sealevel, which is .... well .... my metric conversion calculator says that is 7,057 feet about sea level, and since we started not at sealevel but up a bit, let's round and say the elevation gain was about 5,000 feet. In two hours.  Which for all practical purposes, is just about straight up.