Snow chase: Sutherland, here I come …
· The South African
I have spent this entire weekend refreshing forecasts and calling people in the mountains just to get the timing right. Tomorrow, I finally chase the snow myself.
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My snow chase to Sutherland starts tomorrow, but I have been watching this one build for days already.
Every SAWS update this week kept nudging the same story forward: a cold front, a cut-off low, and a wide stretch of South Africa’s mountains about to turn white.
By the time it actually arrived this weekend, I was already glued to every warning update like it was a scoreboard.
And then it happened …
Snow settled across the Eastern Cape Highlands, into Lesotho, over the southern Drakensberg, and across the Western Cape’s high ground, Matroosberg, the Cederberg, and further into the Karoo’s Roggeveld range near Sutherland.
Five of the best-loved snow spots in the country, all catching flakes within days of each other.
My snow chase to Sutherland: Watching the forecast become real
There is a particular kind of excitement that builds when you have been tracking a system for a full week and it finally delivers.
I read every update SAWS put out, cross-checked timing against what people on the ground were telling me, and watched the warnings shift from “possible” to “confirmed” one province at a time.
By the time the snow actually started falling, it did not feel like a surprise. It felt like watching something I had been promised finally show up.
Why I chose Sutherland, and why tomorrow
I am heading to Sutherland tomorrow morning, and I will not pretend the decision was purely emotional.
Sutherland sits roughly five hours from me, so getting the timing right matters more than almost anywhere else on that list.
Arrive too early and you are standing in the cold for nothing. Arrive too late and the snow has already started melting off.
I spent the past few days doing exactly what a proper snow chaser does: calling people who actually live near the Roggeveld range, asking what they were seeing outside their own windows, and lining that up against what the forecasts were saying.
Snow that continues into Monday and Tuesday gave me the window I needed to plan a trip that actually has a shot at catching it well.
The chase itself
There is something almost ridiculous about driving five hours on a hunch built from weather warnings and phone calls to strangers near a mountain range, and I would not have it any other way.
This is the part of winter I genuinely look forward to every single year, the anticipation, the phone calls, the slightly obsessive checking of forecasts, and then finally, the drive itself.
I will be sharing how the snow chase to Sutherland goes once I am back.
Have you ever planned an entire trip around a weather forecast, snow chasing or otherwise?
Let us know in the comments below, Mzansi …
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