Waypoint Namibia: Big Walls, Desert Mirages, and Perseverance in the Darmaland and Beyond. *
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 01:51PM 
Majka Burhardt on Southern Crossing, 5.11+, V. Photo by Peter Doucette.
On June 1st, Peter Doucette, Kate Rutherford and I completed Southern Crossing: a 1300-foot 5.11+, grade 5 rock climbing first ascent on the Brandberg, Namibia’s highest peak. But that’s only part of the story. There’s also a 2,000+ year-old painted giraffe, 108-degree temperatures, eight days at 15km/hour over washboard roads, scorpions, laser sharp granite cracks, crumbling granite faces, and 1.7 meter-long cobra tracks.
Forty-two days ago, I went to Namibia expecting to climb, explore, and push my understanding of how curiosity, ambition, and adventure work vis a vis culture. I knew all of these components would come into play during the month long trip, I just didn’t know the formulation. In the north, where we’d originally planned to climb the most, our best 
Kate Rutherford, Peter Doucette, and Majka Burhardt. Photo by Chris Alstrin.moments came from sitting in the shade of an Acacia tree with a group of Himba women painted in red ochre and butterfat. They spoke Himba, Afrikaans, and Portuguese; we spoke English and Spanish. Hand gestures and figures drawn in the sand eventually told the story of dirt-track roads, established trails, and unexplored mountains. Further south, on the Brandberg, we scraped through the dirt, bushes, and bird refuse that guarded our prospective line for three days to get to what we hoped would be a way up. Each day, we looked for a way for this country, the “easy Africa,” to give us portals to a higher stance, a greater understanding, or a smooth road. We eventually found all of them.