Climbing Legogote – White River

Legogote or The Legogoto Mountain, fondly known as the Lion Rock to some, is in my mind, one of the most iconic landmarks in our area. To the east of Legogote stretches the Lowveld and to the west the escarpment foothills in the Peebles area. The pinnacle rock is a large granite boulder that stands at 1194 metres.

My husband and I have lived in White River for over four years, and in that time we had spoken about hiking up Legogote many times. Finally one beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon in February, with nothing else to do, we decided to climb our iconic rock. We were so excited when we finally got up there. The hike itself is pretty, with parts being really overgrown (you have to bushwhack a bit). The mountain is used by locals in the nearby community for grazing their animals, so be prepared to run into a few cows/goats along the way. The general path is pretty easy to follow. There are other paths, but just keep heading towards the pinnacle rock and you should get there (with hopefully only a few detours).

To get to Legogote, you must first head to Petra Mountain Retreat and Conference Centre (see directions here). A really nice lady over the intercom let us in through the gate to park our car, and told us where to go to start the hike. My GPS said that the hike was just under 5km and it took us about 1hr45m to get up and about 1hr to get down. I would call it a moderate hike for the most part, the last bit to get up onto the pinnacle is a bit tricky though! Supposedly you can find some bushman paintings near the top, but we couldn’t find any. If anyone has more information on these (and on the mountain for that matter), please contact us!

If you want to climb Legogote with a group, you can contact the Lowveld Rambling Club. They have more information about the hike, and I see from their schedule they also have another hike planned for 21 November 2015 (I also see that they say the hike is 8km, so maybe we took a shortcut).

I love Instagram, and use it daily to look up local interests. I found some awesome photographs of people climbing Legogote. These are some of my favourites below – and you can check the rest out here: https://instagram.com/explore/tags/legogote. Make sure to also follow us on Instagram – instagram.com/wearewhiteriver

A special thank you to the following instagram users @my_pilgrimage, @vanwykkkayla, @trekbefok, @kingdennyx & @hethedale for their photographs.

Charlotte Senini Mortlock – We Are White River