Mount Kilimanjaro

• 1. Introduction

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  Mount Kilimanjaro first entered European records as a puzzle about a color. On the 11th of May 1848, the German missionary Johannes Rebmann noticed that the top of one of the Jagga mountains seemed to wear a beautiful white cloud. He asked his guide about the dazzling whiteness, and the guide answered with a single word, 'cold.' Rebmann wrote in his diary that he understood at once. It could be neither more nor less than snow.

  That realization explained something. He and his colleague Dr. Krapf had heard marvelous tales at the coast, tales of a vast mountain of gold and silver far in the interior, its approach guarded by evil spirits. Rebmann now knew how to read them.

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• 2. Three Volcanic Cones

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  Three cones of very different heights make up the mountain. Kibo is the tallest, Mawenzi reaches 5,149 metres, and Shira, the lowest, reaches 4,005 metres. Mawenzi and Shira are extinct. Kibo is only dormant, which means it could erupt again.

  Measured from its plateau base, the whole massif rises 4,900 metres, which makes it the highest free-standing mountain above sea level in the world. It is also the highest volcano in the Eastern Hemisphere and the fourth most prominent peak on Earth.

  Uhuru Peak sits on the crater rim of Kibo. The Tanzania National Parks Authority and UNESCO both list its height as 5,895 metres, a figure taken from a British survey in 1952. Later measurements disagree. One gave 5,892 metres in 1999, another 5,902 metres in 2008, and a third 5,899 metres in 2014.

  In October 2022, the International Union of Geological Sciences placed the Pleistocene Kilimanjaro volcano on its list of 100 geological heritage sites. The citation singled out the mountain as the highest stratovolcano of the East African Rift that keeps a glacier on its summit.

  The inside of the volcano remains poorly known. Little erosion has cut deep enough to expose the rock layers that build it. The oldest part is Shira, where eruptions began about 2.4 million years ago. Its last important phase came roughly 1.9 million years ago, just before the northern part of the structure collapsed. A broad high plain at 3,800 metres now tops Shira, and it may be a filled caldera.

  Mawenzi and Kibo both began erupting about 1 million years ago, and the Saddle Plateau at 4,400 metres separates them. The youngest dated rocks on Mawenzi are about 448,000 years old. Deep erosion has carved it into a horseshoe-shaped ridge of pinnacles, with a subsidiary peak called Neumann Tower at 4,425 metres.

  Kibo is the largest cone, more than 24 kilometres wide at the level of the Saddle Plateau. Its last activity, dated to between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago, shaped the present summit crater. Gas still escapes from fumaroles inside it. Cliffs of 180 to 200 metres on the south side outline a caldera 2.5 kilometres across.

  Nested inside that caldera is the Inner Cone, and inside the Inner Cone lies Reusch Crater. The Tanganyika government named it in 1954 for Gustav Otto Richard Reusch, after he climbed the mountain for the 25th time. Over his lifetime he made 65 attempts. At the bottom of the crater, the Ash Pit drops 350 metres. About 100,000 years ago, part of the crater rim collapsed and left the Western Breach and the Great Barranco.

  More than 250 smaller parasitic cones dot the northwest and southeast flanks of Kibo. They formed between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago, and their lava reaches as far as Lake Chala and Taveta in the southeast. Despite their modest size, the flows have buried large parts of the older mountain.

  Nineteenth-century reports gathered from the Maasai add a human footnote. They say that a village once stood at Lake Chala on Kibo's eastern flank, and that an eruption destroyed it.

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• 3. Names and Legends

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  The Chagga people of the Kilimanjaro Region have no name for the mountain as a whole, yet they name its two peaks. They call them Kipoo and Kimawenze, which outsiders usually write as Kibo and Mawenzi. Kibo means 'spotted,' a reference to its snow. Mawenzi means 'broken top,' a reference to its jagged outline.

  One theory says the famous name began as a misunderstanding. The Chagga may have called the mountain unclimbable, using words such as kilemanjaare or kilemajyaro, and explorers may have taken the phrase for a name. The Kichagga roots would be kileme, 'that which defeats,' or kilelema, 'that which has become difficult or impossible.' The ending -jaro might come from njaare, a bird, or from jyaro, a caravan. Another suggestion is that jyaro refers to a god who guarded the mountain from trespassers.

  Early Western scholars looked to Swahili instead. In 1860, Johann Ludwig Krapf wrote that Swahili speakers used the name Kilimanjaro, and that it meant either 'mountain of greatness' or 'mountain of caravans.' In 1885, the Scottish explorer Joseph Thomson reported 'white mountain' as an alternative, reading njaro as whiteness. Critics note a problem. Kilima is a diminutive of mlima, the word for mountain, so it really means 'hill.' Still, mlima may have been recorded as kilima after being confused with the peak names Kipoo and Kimawenze.

  Krapf also described an 1849 visit with a Wakamba chief who called the mountain Kima jajeu, 'mountain of whiteness.'

  In the 1880s, the mountain became part of German East Africa, and German maps wrote it as Kilima-Ndscharo. In 1889, Hans Meyer reached the highest summit on Kibo and named it Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze for Kaiser Wilhelm. After the Zanzibar Revolution and the formation of Tanzania in 1964, the summit was renamed Uhuru Peak, Swahili for 'Freedom Peak.'

  Until 1963, the southern and eastern slopes belonged to the Chagga Kingdoms, which Julius Nyerere abolished that year. The Chagga tell of a man named Tone who provoked a god, Ruwa, and Ruwa answered by sending famine. The angry people drove Tone away. Only a solitary dweller would shelter him, a man whose stones turned miraculously into cattle. The dweller forbade Tone ever to open the cattle stable. Tone disobeyed, and the cattle escaped. As Tone chased them, the fleeing animals threw up hills to run on, including Mawenzi and Kibo. Tone finally collapsed on Kibo, and the pursuit ended.

  Another Chagga tradition speaks of graves filled with elephant ivory on the mountain. It also tells of a cow named Rayli, whose tail glands yield miraculous fat. A thief who is too slow in stealing one of those glands gets blasted by Rayli's powerful snort and blown down onto the plain.

  Outsiders may have heard of the mountain far earlier. Ptolemy recorded sailors' reports of a 'moon mountain' and a spring lake of the Nile, which might point to Kilimanjaro. The surviving information cannot tell it apart from Mount Kenya, the mountains of Ethiopia, the Virunga Mountains or the Rwenzori Mountains. Before Ptolemy, Aeschylus wrote of an 'Egypt nurtured by the snows,' and Herodotus mentioned a spring between two mountains.

  In 1519, the Spanish traveler Martín Fernández de Enciso, who reached Mombasa and questioned native caravans about the interior, wrote in his Summa de Geografía about a mountain west of Mombasa. He called it the 'Ethiopian Mount Olympus' and placed the Mountains of the Moon beyond it, where the Nile was said to rise.

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• 4. Ice Near the Equator

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  In the late 1880s, an ice cap about 20 square kilometres in extent covered the summit of Kibo. Outlet glaciers poured down the western and southern slopes. Except for the inner cone, the entire caldera lay buried, and ice even flowed through the Western Breach.

  That ice exists because Kilimanjaro is a massive, little-dissected mountain that rises above the snow line. The cap splits into separate glaciers at its edges, and the Kibo crater interrupts its center. The summit ice is so thin that it shows no significant sideways movement.

  Geological evidence points to five glacial episodes in the Quaternary period. The first dates to about 500,000 years ago, and the last, called the Little episode, ran from 16,000 to 14,000 years ago. During the Last Glacial Maximum, a continuous cap of roughly 400 square kilometres reached down to 3,200 metres and spanned the summits of both Kibo and Mawenzi.

  A long dry spell afterward, the Younger Dryas, may have wiped the ice out around 11,500 years ago. Cores from the Northern Ice Field show a basal age of about 11,700 years. Ice sampled from exposed cliffs in 2011, however, supports an age of only 800 years. Higher rainfall at the start of the Holocene let the cap reform, and it survived a drought of about three centuries that began around 4,000 years ago.

  Between October 1912 and June 2011, almost 85 percent of the ice cover disappeared, falling from 11.40 square kilometres to less than one. The loss averaged about 1.1 percent a year from 1912 to 1953 and 1.4 percent a year from 1953 to 1989. From 1989 to 2007, it rose to 2.5 percent a year. Of the ice still present in 2000, almost 40 percent had vanished by 2011.

  Ice climber Will Gadd noticed differences between his climbs in 2014 and 2020. The glaciers are growing thinner as well as smaller, and they have no active accumulation zones. Melting and sublimation both strip away mass.

  The cause is debated in the research. The slope glaciers retreated rapidly between 1912 and 1953 after a sudden climate shift at the end of the 19th century left them 'drastically out of equilibrium.' Yet the data show no clear warming trend at their elevation between 1948 and 2005, and falling humidity appears to matter more than temperature. Air there always stays below freezing, but sunlight melts the vertical ice walls at the glacier edges. One assessment concludes that 'There is no pathway for the plateau glaciers other than to continuously retreat once their vertical margins are exposed to solar radiation.'

  The plateau glaciers on the crater floor have a different record. They have appeared and vanished repeatedly through the Holocene, each cycle lasting a few hundred years. Ice cores, including two from the southern icefield, suggest that icefield formed between 1,250 and 1,450 years ago.

  The largest glaciers in Africa belong to this mountain, among them the Credner, Furtwängler and Rebmann glaciers. The Furtwangler Glacier is named for Walter Furtwangler, who climbed to the summit in 1912 with Ziegfried Koenig as the fourth person to do so. It has since retreated by more than 80 percent.

  A 2013 estimate held that, at the current pace of global warming, most of the ice will be gone by 2040. The same estimate stated that 'it is highly unlikely that any ice body will remain after 2060.' Even so, the complete loss of the ice would be of 'negligible importance' to the water budget around the mountain. The forests far below, not the ice, serve as the essential water reservoirs for local and regional populations.

  Rivers and streams drain the wetter and more eroded southern side, mostly above 1,200 metres. Below that level, evaporation and human water use thin the flow. The Lumi River drains the eastern side, and the Pangani drains the southern side.

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• 5. Climbers and Claims

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  In August 1861, the Prussian officer Baron Karl Klaus von der Decken and the English geologist Richard Thornton tried to climb Kibo. Bad weather stopped them at 8,200 feet. In December 1862, von der Decken tried again with Otto Kersten and reached 14,000 feet. In August 1871, the missionary Charles New became the 'first European to reach the equatorial snows,' at a little over 13,000 feet.

  The Hungarian Count Sámuel Teleki and the Austrian Lieutenant Ludwig von Höhnel made their attempt in June 1887. They approached from the saddle between Mawenzi and Kibo. Höhnel stopped at 4,950 metres, while Teleki pressed on to the snow at 5,300 metres. Later that year, the German geology professor Hans Meyer reached the lower edge of the Kibo ice cap but had to turn back, because he lacked the equipment to cross it.

  Meyer planned another attempt the following year with the cartographer Oscar Baumann. The mission ended when the two were taken hostage and ransomed during the Abushiri Revolt. In the autumn of 1888, the American naturalist Abbott and the German explorer Otto Ehrenfried Ehlers approached from the northwest. Abbott turned back early. Ehlers first claimed to have reached the summit rim, then withdrew the claim after severe criticism.

  Meyer came back in 1889 with the Austrian mountaineer Ludwig Purtscheller. This time they set up several campsites stocked with food, so that they could try for the top repeatedly without descending far. On the 3rd of October, they pushed to near the crater rim but turned back exhausted from hacking footsteps into the icy slope. Three days later, they reached the highest summit, on the southern rim of the crater. They were the first to confirm that Kibo has a crater.

  They then crossed to the saddle and tried Mawenzi, the more technical cone. Illness forced them to retreat after reaching only Klute Peak, a subsidiary summit. On the 18th of October, they climbed Kibo again to study the crater, crossing the rim at Hans Meyers Notch. In total, the pair spent 16 days above 15,000 feet. Mwini Amani of Pangani accompanied them in the high camps, cooking and supplying the sites with water and firewood.

  In 1909, the London-born Gertrude Benham set out for the summit. Her porters abandoned the expedition after finding the skeletons of earlier climbers. She continued alone and reached the edge of Kibo Crater, a spot later named Gilman's Point. Heavy snow and fog made navigation hard, and she turned back. The first woman to complete the ascent was Sheila MacDonald, on the 30th of September 1927.

  On the 29th of July 1912, the German climbers Eduard Hans Oehler and Fritz Klute made the first ascent of the highest summit of Mawenzi and named it Hans Meyer Peak. They then made the third-ever ascent of Kibo by the Drygalski Glacier and came down through the Western Breach. Two years later, the mountain gave its name to the 1914 Battle of Kilimanjaro in World War I.

  In 1989, the committee organizing the centennial of the first ascent decided to award posthumous certificates to the African porter-guides who had accompanied Meyer and Purtscheller. One figure in the pictures and documents of the 1889 expedition seemed to match a living resident of Marangu, Yohani Kinyala Lauwo. Lauwo did not know his own age and did not remember Meyer or Purtscheller. He did recall joining an expedition with a Dutch doctor who lived near the mountain, and he remembered climbing without shoes. He claimed three climbs before World War I began.

  The committee concluded that he had been a member of Meyer's team and must therefore have been born around 1871. Lauwo died on the 10th of May 1996, 107 years after the first ascent. Some people suggest he should be counted as a co-first ascendant.

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• 6. Climate and Life Zones

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  Two distinct rainy seasons water the mountain, one from March to May and another around November. The lower southern slope receives 800 to 900 millimetres of rain a year. At 1,500 metres the figure climbs to between 1,500 and 2,000 millimetres, and in the forest belt at 2,000 to 2,300 metres it peaks at partly over 3,000 millimetres. The northern slopes are much drier. In the alpine zone, annual precipitation falls to 200 millimetres.

  The height of the mountain lets equatorial trade winds and high-altitude anti-trades act on it at the same time. Winds blow upslope by day and downslope by night, and the pattern is stronger on the southern side. The flatter southern flanks spread wider and affect the atmosphere more strongly.

  The average temperature in the summit area is about -7 C. On the Northern Ice Field, nights average -9 C and daytime highs average -4 C. On nights of extreme radiational cooling, that ice field can drop as low as -15 to -27 C. Snow can fall at any time of year, though it clusters in the two rainy seasons, and it may melt away within days or last for years. Because of the equator, seasonal swings are small and temperatures are relatively mild. The climate is classified as an ice-cap climate.

  A series of belts climbs the slope. Bushland and lower slope run from 800 to 1,800 metres, followed by rainforest to 2,800 metres, then heather and moorland to 4,000 metres. Alpine desert covers 4,000 to 5,000 metres, and an arctic zone reaches from 5,000 metres to the summit.

  At the foot of the mountain, farmers grow maize, beans and sunflowers, with wheat on the western side. Remnants of the former savanna still hold Acacia, Combretum, Terminalia and Grewia. Between 1,000 and 1,800 metres, coffee grows as part of the Chagga home gardens, an agroforestry system. Native trees at that height, including Strombosia, Newtonia and Entandrophragma, survive only in inaccessible valleys and gorges.

  On the southern slope, montane forest begins with Ocotea usambarensis, ferns and epiphytes. Higher up, cloud forest brings Podocarpus latifolius, Hagenia abyssinica, Erica excelsa and fog-dependent mosses. The drier northern slopes grow olive, Croton-Calodendrum, Cassipourea and Juniperus forests, in that order as the land rises. Erica bush and heathland fill the zone from 3,100 to 3,900 metres, and Helichrysum continues to 4,500 metres. Natural forests cover about 1,000 square kilometres in all. One endemic plant is the giant groundsel Dendrosenecio kilimanjari. The Tussock Grassland, another distinctive area, shelters unique species such as the water holding cabbage.

  Acacia savanna dominates the lower northern and western slopes. Most of the wooded grassland on the lower southern and eastern slopes, by contrast, has been cleared for farming.

  Large animals are rare, and they are most common in the forests and lower parts of the mountain. Elephants and Cape buffaloes can be dangerous to trekkers. Bushbucks, chameleons, dik-diks, duikers, mongooses, sunbirds and warthogs have also been reported. Zebras, leopards and hyenas turn up occasionally on the Shira plateau. Two species tied to the mountain are the Kilimanjaro shrew and the chameleon Kinyongia tavetana.

  Records from the Maundi crater at 2,780 metres show that the vegetation has shifted over time. Between 42,000 and 30,000 years ago, drier and colder conditions pushed the forest back and lowered the ericaceous belt by 1,500 metres.

  Since 1973, the mountain has been a national park, and human activities inside its boundaries are prohibited to protect the ecosystem. The government has also banned tree harvesting to stop environmental degradation and protect the park's biodiversity.

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• 7. Trekking and Risk

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  Kilimanjaro National Park earned US$51 million in 2013, the second-highest revenue of any Tanzanian national park. In the 2011-12 budget year, it recorded 57,456 tourists, of whom 16,425 hiked the mountain. The park's General Management Plan sets an annual capacity of 28,470 for the climb.

  In 2007, hikers created irregular, seasonal work for about 11,000 guides, porters and cooks. Concerns have been raised about their poor working conditions and inadequate wages. Because the park draws so many visitors, the Tanzanian government has invested in road infrastructure, and Kilimanjaro International Airport serves as an important transport hub.

  The official trekking routes include Lemosho, Machame, Marangu, Mweka, Rongai, Shira and Umbwe, along with the Lemosho Western-Breach variant. Machame takes 6 to 7 days, Lemosho 6 to 8, and the Northern Circuit routes 7 or more. The Western Breach is more secluded and avoids the six-hour midnight ascent that other routes require. Rongai is the easiest of the camping routes. Marangu is also relatively easy but often crowded, and climbers sleep in shared huts.

  Mawenzi follows different rules. Its technical routes require a special permit from the Tanzania National Parks Authority, issued only to experienced climbers with suitable equipment. No more than two climbers may be on the cone at once, and only in daylight.

  The climb is less technical than the Himalayas or the Andes, yet altitude, cold and occasional high winds make it hard. A study of people attempting the summit in July and August 2005 found that 61.3 percent succeeded and 77 percent suffered acute mountain sickness. A retrospective study of 917 climbers on the Lemosho or Machame routes found that 70.4 percent had the sickness, defined as headache, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting or loss of appetite.

  The summit lies well above the altitude where the severe forms, high altitude pulmonary edema and high altitude cerebral edema, can strike. Fast schedules raise the danger. High daily park fees, busy holiday travel and the lack of permanent shelter on most routes all push climbers to hurry. The six-day Machame route has one day of 'climbing high' to Lava Tower at 15,190 feet and 'sleeping low' at Barranco Camp at 13,044 feet. That pattern may delay the onset of sickness but does not prevent it.

  Falls on steep sections and rockslides have killed trekkers. For that reason, the route via the Arrow Glacier was closed for several years and reopened in December 2007. It was officially closed again as of the 20th of January 2024. Strong El Niño rains washed the Western Breach down the mountain, carving new ravines and loosening the sediment that holds the rock together. A river now runs through Arrow Glacier Camp, where there had been no water for decades. Improper disposal of human waste has also created a health hazard, so all water must be boiled.

  The Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Moshi reported 25 deaths among climbers from January 1996 to October 2003. Seventeen of the dead were women and eight were men, aged from 29 to 74. Fourteen died of advanced high altitude illness. The other eleven died of trauma, heart attack, pneumonia, cardio-pulmonary failure from another cause, and acute appendicitis. The overall mortality rate was 13.6 per 100,000 climbers.

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• 8. Records and Culture

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  Anne Lorimor reached Uhuru Peak at 3:14 p.m. on the 18th of July 2019, at the age of 89 years and 37 days, making her the oldest person to climb the mountain. The oldest man is the American Fred Dishelhorst, who summited on the 19th of July 2017 at 88 years, 5 months and 28 days. He used supplemental oxygen on summit day.

  The park sets a minimum age of 10 for a climbing permit. Even so, Keats Boyd of Los Angeles reached the top on the 21st of January 2008 at the age of 7. Montannah Kenney of Texas matched that in March 2018, and Coaltan Tanner of New Mexico did the same in July 2018.

  On the 13th of August 2014, the Swiss-Ecuadorian mountain guide Karl Egloff set both speed marks. After guiding a party to the summit in the previous days, he ran from Umbwe Gate to the top in 4 hours and 56 minutes. He returned to Mweka Gate at 1,630 metres in a total of 6 hours, 42 minutes and 24 seconds.

  The female round-trip record belongs to Fernanda Maciel of Brazil, at 10 hours and 6 minutes. Her ascent time of 7 hours and 8 minutes was beaten on the 23rd of February 2018 by the Danish ultramarathon runner Kristina Schou Madsen. Madsen climbed from Mweka Gate in 6 hours, 52 minutes and 54 seconds.

  Several climbs by disabled people have drawn attention. The wheelchair user Bernard Goosen of South Africa scaled the mountain in 6 days in 2007. In 2012, Kyle Maynard, who has no forearms or lower legs, crawled unassisted to the summit. In 2020, a team including the double above-knee amputees Hari Budha Magar and Justin Oliver Davis reached the top. They took 6 days to cover the 56 kilometres to the summit.

  On the 9th of February 2015, the Red Bull athlete Valerii Rozov made the first wing-suit BASE jump from the summit. He flew about 3 kilometres before landing on the southern slope.

  The journalist Tom Bissell called Kilimanjaro 'perhaps the world's most literary mountain.' Ernest Hemingway set his 1936 short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro there, and a 1952 film adaptation starred Gregory Peck. Dave Eggers wrote about his own ascent in the short story Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly. Andrei Gusev's 2020 novel Once in Malindi depicts the climb in its 17th chapter.

  The mountain appears in Toto's 1982 song 'Africa,' and an IMAX film of an ascent, Kilimanjaro: To The Roof Of Africa, came out in 2002. The Lion King franchise also features it prominently.

  The writer Douglas Adams climbed the mountain wearing a rubber rhinoceros suit, to raise money for African rhino conservation.

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