An unidentified man died in a fall from the top of Table Mountain on Tuesday, Wilderness Search and Rescue said.
Spokesperson Dion Tromp said it appeared the man was sitting on a rock near the upper cable station when he had some sort of a seizure.
He fell off the rock, but ”didn’t fall too far”, Tromp said.
While he was climbing back up, he appeared to have a second seizure, and fell again.
”He fell all the way out of sight from the top of the mountain,” Tromp said.
Rescuers in a Skymed rescue helicopter found his body on Upper Africa Ledge, which meant he had fallen 70m.
The body was winched on a stretcher into the helicopter and transferred to an ambulance at Kloof Nek.
Tromp said the man was middle aged, but no-one in the vicinity knew who he was.
”He seemed to be a visitor to the top of the mountain; he wasn’t a hiker or a climber,” he said.
The rescue team received the Table Mountain call just after they had finished dealing with an earlier accident, in which a male hiker was seriously injured after falling off Chapman’s Peak on Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard.
After being stabilised by paramedics, the hiker was airlifted to Groote Schuur Hospital where he was in a serious but stable condition. — Sapa