The Night the Drakensberg Went White

Some mornings you open the door and the world has simply changed.

On the morning of 24 September 2024, we woke up at Oaklands to knee-deep snow. Not a dusting. Not a photogenic skiff on the distant peaks. Knee deep. The old fruit trees in the garden were bent under the weight of it, every branch traced in white, the farm utterly silent in the way only heavy snowfall can silence a place.

It was the heaviest snow we'd seen at Van Reenen's Pass since 2012.

Stranded

Down on the N3 — the highway that runs past our gates and connects Johannesburg to Durban — the picture was dramatically different. It was a long weekend, the road was packed with holiday traffic, and the snow came hard and fast. The N3 closed. Completely. Thousands of travellers sat in their cars for up to 48 hours, stranded on one of South Africa's busiest arteries, unable to move in either direction.

We watched it unfold from behind a wall of white, cut off from the outside world in our own way. Power went out. Telecommunications dropped to zero. No signal, no updates, no way of knowing quite what was happening beyond the farm's boundaries — and no way for most of our guests to reach us either.

The Ones Who Made It

A handful of guests were already with us when the snow came down. And those guests — they had something most people will never have: Oaklands in a full whiteout, entirely to themselves.

We kept the fires burning. The kitchen didn't miss a beat — warm, generous food, the kind that makes sense when there's snow pressing against the windowpanes. With no phones, no Wi-Fi, and nowhere to go, something shifted. Conversations deepened. Time slowed down. People who'd arrived as strangers found themselves sharing a table, a fire, a strange and beautiful once-in-a-decade experience.

It reminded us why we built this place the way we did — a working farm that can look after itself and the people in it, whatever the mountain decides to throw at us.

A Rare Thing

Snow at Van Reenen's Pass isn't unheard of. But snow like this — the kind that closes highways, buries gardens, and turns a spring morning into a scene from another country — that's rare. In twelve years of farming this escarpment, we'd never seen anything quite like it.

If you were one of the lucky few who made it through our gates that weekend, you know. And if you weren't — well, now you know the kind of place we are when the weather turns wild.

Oaklands is always worth the drive up the pass. But on a morning like that one, it was worth absolutely everything.

Oaklands Farm Stay sits on the Drakensberg Escarpment at Van Reenen's Pass, KwaZulu-Natal — a 17-room working regenerative farm and guesthouse. Book direct at oaklands.co.za or call 079 529 2314.