Sesriem Canyon

The entrance gives nothing away. A gravel clearing, a sign, a few steps worn into the rock. Ten metres down the air on your arms turns cool, as suddenly as if a door had opened next door, and the white glare you came in from stays behind you.

At the bottom the walls stand close enough in places to touch both at once. The sound changes too. Out on the plain the wind pulls every word away, while down here the rock throws it back, and the gravel under your shoes crunches twice as loud. This is the one place in the whole area where you can get out of the sun for an hour.

Length

about 1 kmwalkable end to end

Depth

up to 30 mcut by the Tsauchab

Narrowest point

around 2 mwall to wall

Location

about 4 kmfrom Sesriem settlement, right by the park gate

Time needed

a good hourthere and back, longer with photo stops

Entry

covered by the park permitpaid at the Sesriem gate

Six thongs and a bucket

Sesriem is Afrikaans for six thongs. The name goes back to the Dorsland trekkers, Boers who crossed this country by ox wagon in the nineteenth century and looked for water where there was none. In the gorge there was some. It just lay a long way down. No rope they carried reached that far.

So they cut strips from oryx hide, knotted six of them together and lowered a bucket. Six thongs was the distance to the water. That measurement turned into a place name, and it now covers the settlement, the park gate and the gorge itself.

How old the rock is, and why the figures disagree

The walls are conglomerate, old river gravel: sand, grit and rounded stones baked together by lime. On when those layers formed, the sources pull apart badly. The German Wikipedia describes tertiary sedimentary rock and puts it at around five million years. Several geology and travel sources give 15 to 18 million years instead for the deposition of the calcrete conglomerate, from a time when the Namib was wetter than it is now.

On the canyon itself the figures sit closer together. The Tsauchab cut into those layers two to four million years ago, after continental uplift gave the river more gradient. For the erosion alone the German Wikipedia names roughly two million years. Same order of magnitude. Where the river comes from and why it almost never reaches the pan at Sossusvlei is covered under how the Namib formed.

The waterhole and what lives off it

The canyon carries water irregularly, usually after heavy rain further up the catchment. One spot, though, holds water all year. In a landscape with no open water anywhere else, that makes it a meeting point, and animals come there to drink.

What you are most likely to see is rock hyrax, stocky animals about the size of a marmot, sitting on the ledges and vanishing into a crack as you come closer. Baboons you usually hear first. Birds nest in holes in the rock faces along the whole length of the canyon, and now and then a snake lies out on warm stone in the morning.

When to walk it

The canyon sits about four kilometres from Sesriem settlement, right beside the park gate. No 60 kilometre drive, no deep sand, no leaving in the dark. You need no separate ticket, since the permit from the Sesriem gate covers the canyon as well. That is exactly why it belongs in the hours when the dunes give you nothing.

With the sun overhead the ridges lose their edges and the red goes dull. Down in the gorge none of that matters. Allow a good hour for the kilometre there and back, an hour and a half with photo stops. The floor is loose gravel with rock steps between, there are a few blocks to climb over, and sandals will not survive it.

Our tipSave the canyon for the midday heat or the late afternoon rather than the morning. Mornings belong to the dunes, and by noon there is shade down in the gorge while the rim has none. Two things go with you: water and closed shoes, even for a single hour.