Flying High with the HeliHackers

Strapped into a climbing harness, I hooked my carabiner through a three-holed metal plate attached to the end of a 30-metre-long rope. So did two guys in neon orange T-shirts carrying chainsaws. Team leader Max Vos warned me that this was going to be a cosy threesome like no other. He checked our gear, looked kindly into my terrified eyes and with a rotation of his outstretched arm indicated to the helicopter pilot that we were ready. The startling upward momentum was unlike any fairground ride I’d ever been on, and through a cloud of dust, the chopper headed skywards, and we went with it.

I was dangling far below the helicopter in a close embrace with two men I’d met moments earlier. Conversation was out of the question as we hurtled at 110 kilometres per hour across the landscape, from a take-off point inside Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens to the slopes of Devil’s Peak. I could barely see out of watering eyes, and my body went rigid from the huge dose of adrenaline pumping through me. Tourists below looked up in amazement.

The 11-minute safety video I had to study in advance said I had to be technically competent in rope skills, chainsawing, tree felling, and be able to work in steep and difficult mountain terrain. I panicked - I was incompetent at all of them. All I had was an irrational desire to place myself in situations that scared me. Should I back out?

“Don’t worry, we’ll put you with some experienced helihackers. They’ll look after you,” said Aleck Mckirdy, head honcho of The HeliHack Initiative and one of the four directors of this NPO. Aleck and his son Chris are arborists, so dangling from ropes at great heights is like a busman’s holiday for them.

Now 73 years old, Mckirdy remembers his parents taking him to cut alien vegetation at about seven years old. “It’s in my blood,” he says. While doing mountain rescue, he realised that helicopters were the only way to reach invasive vegetation that had rooted on steep mountain slopes. Like him, a lot of the helihack volunteers come with mountain rescue and rock-climbing experience, and many are members of the Mountain Club, or the University of Cape Town Mountain & Ski Club. The camaraderie in risk-taking endeavours transfers perfectly to helihacking, where a touch of crazy and a measure of fearlessness are required.

Dr Roger Diamond has these qualities in abundance. Since his student days at UCT, to his current academic career as an Isotope Hydrogeologist at his alma mater, he has never stopped doing risky pursuits. “I’ve done amazing climbs on peaks and pinnacles, but hacking has a sense of giving back and doing some good in the mountains,” he says. “There’s a community spirit amongst helihackers born from doing something important and urgent.”

The helihackers collectively agree that it's satisfying to get to places you’d otherwise never be able to reach. It’s steep and dangerous, with a need to concentrate on not getting hurt, at the same time as clearing a whole area of alien trees. “I’m amazed that not more people volunteer,” said Diamond, “because flying through the air beneath a helicopter and blitzing an area of pine trees is a great buzz.”

Landing on the slopes of Devil’s Peak happened in a flash, and unhitching was by necessity quick. I wasn’t expecting the ground to slope quite so precipitously, and, in my haste to untether, I sprawled with arms and legs flailing in danger of sliding down the mountain. It was only the thick foliage and Max’s firm grip that kept me in place. My hands were trembling from the self-induced high of whizzing through the air, dangling like a spider on a flimsy thread. While the guys got straight to work, I had to take a moment to compose myself. Each of the fifteen or so hackers on that day cut about 50 pine trees from the slopes of Table Mountain.

“Why do you do it?” I asked Dr Kate Larmuth, a Senior Science Lecturer and Researcher at UCT and one of the most experienced of the helihackers. She has an unflappable demeanour, probably due to the countless helihacks she’s done over the past ten years. “I’m passionate about the environment,” she explains, “and our green spaces are becoming smaller and are being invaded by alien vegetation.” She adds, “it’s very therapeutic because you cannot think about anything other than the moment; like don’t fall off the mountain and don’t let the tree land on you! If you are standing on a ledge not much bigger than a step and you are trying to cut a big tree, you’d better get it right,” she asserts. That’s clearly a memory from reality, not just theory. “It’s most satisfying when the chopper collects you after a good day’s hacking, and you can look down on an entire area cleared of aliens.”

Much of the recent hacking has been done in Cape Nature Reserves, which sponsor part of the costs for weekend hacks in hard-to-reach sections of their reserves. The helicopter is hired from private owners and charged for flight time, not loan time, at about R35,000 per hour, including pilot. A weekend clearing invasive plants in Grootvadersbosch Nature Reserve took 14.4 hours of flying, cleared 15,000 trees and cost R504,000. Bringing in an experienced, passionate and more-to-the-point unpaid team is the most cost-effective way to clear alien vegetation.

“Helihacking burns through the money,” stated McKirdy, “which is why we need more donors,” he adds. His wizened face portrays that he’s been at this juncture before. Current funders include charitable conservation trusts such as the Fynbos Trust, Drakenstein Trust and Mapula Trust, but do not include Table Mountain National Park. The hack I took part in was inside this most cherished jewel of Cape Town. The Park Manager did give permission and put out a notice to the public to avoid certain areas, but didn’t contribute funds. Larmuth says they always need volunteers to walk the paths near a hack and keep hikers away from potential danger like falling trees.

Larmuth also explains that volunteers may be deposited somewhere remote, but cannot rely on the helicopter being able to fetch them if the wind comes up. This is why the training video stresses bringing appropriate gear for any eventuality, like a long, hard trek out, which could require rock climbing or abseiling.

The right kind of helicopter is essential for the tricky flying involved in helihacking, and McKirdy favours the Bell 407. He met helicopter pilot Bronte Heinrich while they were flying with a base-jumping film team and noted his finely-tuned skills. “He’s incredible, says McKirdy. “He’s my current favourite pilot and the hacking teams are thankful for the expertise he brings to the job.”

Heinrich cites the twin hooks in the Bell 407 suspended on two points for extra safety, as required for human external cargo. Plus, it's good manoeuvrability - especially when flying close to the mountain - with the ability to look down at what’s going on below. I asked him how he manages to lean out of the chopper and keep it stable while positioning the weight bag and rope in exactly the right place for the hackers far below to hook on. “It’s called long line vertical reference flying and takes a lot of practice,” he laughs, casually adding, “It’s what I do.”

He’s also done tourist flying, movie flying (for the last Mission Impossible film with Tom Cruise aboard), firefighting, and the kind of death-defying manoeuvres that deposit workers on the top of remote electric pylons. Heinrich is as cool as they come, never flustered, always in control, with clear judgment at the extreme end of flying.

Perhaps academics like Diamond and Larmuth are drawn to helihacking because they understand the science behind it. Alien trees like pines, eucalyptus and acacia have deeper roots than native vegetation and use substantially more water. They continue to transpire during droughts, thereby severely reducing water availability. Removing them is a highly effective, nature-based solution and can increase water flow by up to 30%. The alien trees and bushes also change the PH balance of the soil, smother indigenous plants and make veld fires burn hotter, angrier and longer. Their seeds rain down on the mountainside and are dispersed by baboons, accounting for those lone pines on rocky ledges that Larmuth considers a personal challenge.

Heinrich’s voice brought the radio to life, telling us he was on his way to fetch us. Diamond was camouflaged in foliage a little way beneath Vos and I, and rapidly hooked himself onto the rope attachment swinging in front of him. Trapped in a cloak of leaves and branches, he rapidly jettisoned the plant life before hovering in front of us. The threesome quickly reunited and flew through the air back to base after six hours of hacking.

These helihackers take alien clearing to another level, but for them, it’s all in a day’s volunteering. For me, it was a baptism of fire on what both Diamond and Vos say was a particularly steep slope. The experience reminded me to push my boundaries and seize the opportunity to do something different and worthy. I saw firsthand what a difference the helihacking team can make in a day, and while they appreciate volunteers, such individuals need to come with the right skillset - that I sorely lacked - for an extreme day of hacking.

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