The Mt. Longonot Expedition,10/15/09. Warning: Rather lengthy.

After driving from Nairobi down into and across the Rift Valley

and only missing one turn, (Aram was too busy discussing politics, cultural differences and religion with Tobias and me to pay attention to where we were going) we arrived at Mt. Longonot National Park,

drank as much water as we could and began to climb. It was 9:23.

The path at first was a gently sloping gravel road and the rim of the crater looked to be a twenty minute walk away. We saw gazelles, zebras and a large herd of weirdabeasts, we noted the fact that sagebrush actually smelled like sage, and also that the nice smooth road was becoming a steep climb in a two inch thick layer of superfine dust that filled our shoes and our lungs and was not friends with our digital cameras. The twenty minute walk was an hour of half walking half climbing. We came over the top and...

...the ground vanished. The top edge of the crater was, at most, ten feet wide with a two hundred foot drop to the bottom of the crater. The crater is about a mile and a half across (my pictures give no sense of the scale) and the bottom appeared to be fairly smooth with a few bushes here and there. It looked like if we found a way down into the crater it would be easy to cross it and climb the other side to the peak. There was one place where there was no sheer face between the rim and the bottom of the crater and we decided on that as our point of descent.

After walking/sliding/climbing down we discovered that we had severely misjudged the character of the bottom of the crater. There had been a fire recently and it was a charred thicket that covered the bottom and the parts that hadn't burned were so thick with undergrowth that they were nearly impassable.

And it was far from smooth, the entire landscape was a boulder field of the pieces of pumice that had fallen back into the crater after the last eruption.

We realized that crossing the crater was not an option. I climbed a tree to look for a certain cinder cone that we had seen from the top, also to look for a place that we might be able to get back to the top of the rim. I thought that I found both. Once we made it to the cinder cone and got a better view of our surroundings we saw that the ledge I thought we would be able to climb out on was merely a discoloration of the rock. We also drank most of our remaining water. I climbed spike of rock and found another way to exit the crater and, after Aram and Tobias climbed up to have a look around, we headed for it.

Climbing the twenty foot cliff was easy enough, the talus slope was hard because with every two steps up I slid back a step, then we had to climb about 150 vertical feet of almost vertical, hard dirt covered with charred trees.

Oh, and did I mention, the ground was almost too hot, from the sun, to comfortably touch. it took us almost an hour to scramble out of the crater and we were covered with soot, ash, dust and sweat, and we had half a liter of water left. We decided to try for the summit of Longonot which meant climbing another two hundred feet in a mile hike.

I regretted that decision after about a half mile of climbing through dust and pumice gravel. (Keep in mind that this is at 9000 feet where there is a lot less oxygen than at 600 feet where I am used to living) We rested for a bit at the top, looking at the world around us, the Masai herdsmen hundreds of feet below, the dust devils swirling across the dry fields,

the crater and lake Naivasha.

Then we started the descent running and sliding down through the dust and gravel that had been so hard to climb through. We caught up with a group of Kenyan schoolchildren and joined them, dodging the thorny acacia trees in the controlled fall down the side of the mountain the foremost thought in our minds, "WATER!!". We drank a little, not wanting to get sick and drove to Lake Naivasha where we were planning to camp. It was now 3:47.

The view from the top.

In some places the rock is really soft and so it gets weathered easily.