Crossing Jabal al Akhdhar canyon

By Khaled H Abdul Malak -
kamkam@omantel.net.om -
AFTER three trips of exploration starting from Al Kuhoof in Jabal Akhdhar and another three trips starting from Al Fara’ in Wadi Qasheh (one of the main branches of Wadi Tanuf) four of us decided to do the full crossing of the canyon. The unknown part of the trip measured less than 300m in length but around 400m in difference of altitude! We knew that we will have very big drops to abseil and I estimated approximately 12hours time we need to cross the whole wadi and reach our car in Al Fara’.
Marta, my wife, Khaled al Siyabi (the first and only Omani who achieved the climb of Mount Everest), Kester Harris, our friend and geologist from England working for PDO and myself started our trip from Al Mawaleh around 6 am on 28 February this year.
We reached Al Kuhoof at 8.30 am and started our adventurous trip.
Our bags were very heavy filled with all the climbing gear, food and water.
We reached the first drop (around 40m) at midday.
We fixed our first anchor and abseiled down to reach the ledge of a waterfall that I measured in a previous exploration trip. That day my measurer showed me 350m!
We had to walk on the edge of the cliff around half a kilometre before we found the convenient place to start our descent. The full height of the cliff at this point was 225m to the landing spot we chose after consultation with “The Everest guy”.
We managed to reach the ground just before it got dark after fixing four anchors to divide the full distance in four drops.
We had a break at this point to eat and carried on to reach the following waterfall at around 7pm in the dark.
The weather started to be cold and we decided to spend the night at this point.
We had enough food and luckily nearby we found a lot of wood. We had to keep the fire burning all night to avoid making hypothermia.
The night felt so long because we could not sleep and kept on moving to be close to the fire or trying to find a smoother ground to lie down.
When the day broke we saw for the first time the sublime place in which we were. We took around one hour to explore the area and take some pictures.
We started our day with a very refreshing abseil at around 8.30 am in a waterfall ending in a pool in which we landed.
Soon after this waterfall we reached the spot I explored a few weeks back starting from Al Fara’ in the wadi.
From there we had another four drops before we reached the junction with wadi Qasheh (one main branch of Wadi Tanuf).
When we got at this place we stopped and ate what we had before achieving the last part of our trip .
We reached the village of Al Fara’ early afternoon under the rain.
By deducting the night hours it took us approximately 16 hours to achieve our trip.

Sunday 25th, May 2014 / 18:56 Written by Khaled H Abdul Malak 

in Features