Ruwenzori #1: Different Kinds of Epics

Mountains come in all shapes and sizes.  Some are short and gentle day hikes that can divert your attention from an otherwise busy week and help you to unwind on a weekend.  Some are challenging, but you can still get a nice view of the town that you are living or staying in from the summit.  Ruwenzori is neither of these.

Epics also come in all sizes and varieties.  Usually, when you hear the word "EPIC!" used to describe a climb, it means an adventure that  was stunning and awesome and you want to get out and do it again.  Climbers also use "epic" to refer to a situation that became really and unexpectedly complicated in a hurry and turned a straightforward day in a far more difficult adventure, but it's OK because you got through it anyways and it's time to celebrate now.  "Dude, that was an epic!"  "We seriously epiced on that climb when the rains hit and we dropped one of the ropes!"  It connotes something that's simultaneously adventure-cool and terrifying.

Mt. Kenya was the first kind of epic.  Ruwenzori was the second.

I feel I should state at the outset that, despite the problems we encountered, Uganda is a naturally beautiful place that has a lot of areas that are worth visiting.  The country has had a rough recent history (see below), but recently it has begun to seriously reopen to tourism and to welcome people.  Kampala/Entebbe is busy, but a generally friendly and well put-together city.  If the lack of barbed wire-topped walls surrounding all of the buildings (even President Museveni's home) is any indication, it has less violent crime than Nairobi.  The country's periphery is less put-together, but it's suffered a greatly more traumatic history than Uganda's center.

Hearing the word "Congo" doesn't normally bring images of mountains, glaciers, or snowfall to mind.  At best, most people will think of gorillas, the rainforest, and misty hills inhabited by only a few hardy people that know how to survive in the dense, tropical forest.  At worst, people will think of the First and Second Congo Wars of the 1990s and 2000s, during which some of the most devastating, brutal, and perverse fighting of the twentieth century occurred.  The Ruwenzoris form an enormous physical barrier that separates Uganda from the endless violence of the D.R. Congo's North Kivu province.

The journey just to reach the town that Ruwenzori trips are launched from shows you the mountain's remoteness all by itself.  Uganda has a good road and bus system, but it takes about seven hours by bus to travel from Kampala, the capitol of Uganda on Lake Victoria, to Kasese, the last major town in Uganda.  Once you get past the suburbs of Kampala, Ugandan towns get small and spread-out in a hurry.  From Kasese, it would only take you about half an hour to drive into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) if the Ruwenzori Range were not blocking your path.  To get to the trailhead, it takes about 15-20 minutes by car over very rough dirt roads through small farming villages.  You start the drive in the valley below the Ruwenzoris, but you spend most of it driving down a road lined with banana farms.

Uganda is actually as densely populated and relatively prosperous as it is in large part because of the banana.  Apparently, Ugandans began cultivating the fruit, which is originally from southern Asia, around a thousand years ago.  Ugandans became so good at it that it formed one of their staple food crops.  Over the years, they have created more than sixty different banana varieties, including some that are so sweet that they're like squishy little candies.  A bunch of them costs about 2,000 UGX, or US$0.80.  Uganda's Shillings are colorful and interesting, usually featuring the country's iconic wildlife, but a major purchase requires a brick of 50,000 UGX notes (starring the gorilla).  If you bring $400, you can enjoy the temporary sensation of being a millionaire.

[Actually, that's a good idea.  Kasese is a reasonably large and developed town, but the banking services are still limited and the exchange rates get worse the further you get from Kampala.  Should you ever find yourself in rural Uganda, bring some extra cash.]

As the area's location would suggest, it's no stranger to violence.   Uganda was one of the major belligerents in the Congo wars, when it helped to overthrow famous and hated Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.  Later, when Mobutu's replacement didn't please Uganda and its allies, they tried replacing him, then conquering, colonizing, and stripmining the eastern part of the DRC.  For a variety of reasons, the eastern DRC, especially the North and South Kivu provinces (which share a border with Uganda), are a violent mire of strained and complex race relations.  Uganda itself is more of a polyethnic confederation than it is a country.  Uganda is made of several different kingdoms that the British lumped together during colonization.  The country centers around the Buganda Kingdom, which holds much of the nation's political and military power.  The outlying kingdoms don't like this and have a tense relationship with the Buganda, to say the least.  They have a long history of vicious and vengeance-laden warfare.  There have been a lot of different separatist movements, notably Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

Just to add to this, one of the world's worst AIDS outbreaks occurred in Uganda in the 1980s and 1990s.  The country's infection rate reached about 15% in the 1990s.  Since then, health efforts, including those by the EGPAF, have lowered the infection rate back to the single digits, but it's still pretty bad.

In this context exists the Bakonjo Kingdom.  Its people are ethnically distinct from the rest of Uganda, but their kingdom has only been recently recognized by Uganda's government.  Historically, it occupied the entire area surrounding the Ruwenzori Mountains.  It's now divided between Uganda and the DRC.  It spent around 40 years actively fighting for separation from Uganda, including a particularly nasty phase against Idi Amin, but currently is trying to get the UN to support its separation from its parent countries.  Right now, the Ugandan side of the area is stable, but people's attitudes reflect the area's history.

When you are in Kasese and environs, you have to be patient.  People range from "unfriendly" to "overtly hostile" towards outsiders, (I assume) in large part because their history hasn't seen many friendly ones.  Tourism in the area is just experiencing a renaissance after a decade of the Congo Wars kept people away.  Most random people in the street glare and service is slow, unfriendly, and comes with grandiosely inflated prices.  Because you're an outsider, your ability to negotiate and haggle is pretty limited.  If you ever want to go, try your best to find a reliable contact in the area before leaving.  Guiding companies can provide this.  It's not about safety, it's about convenience and having someone to negotiate on your behalf.  Despite the cold reception, if you're in Kasese during daylight hours, people aren't threatening.  Even at night, it's a relatively mellow town.  We arrived at about 12:30 AM and had to catch the last motorcycle taxi of the day to where we were staying, then find a bar that was still serving food to get dinner.  Not friendly, not threatening.

If you're going to eat street food, don't watch it get cooked.  You'll see... things.  Our cook dropped some of the chicken on the ground, but fixed the problem by frying it dirt and all in a pan of boiling oil before depositing it in the bag.  Well, it was sterile.  Wiping the knife he used to cut the chicken on a filthy towel he used to handle the dirtier ground objects around his cook station also didn't add the right elements to the chicken's flavor.  But you can't be too choosey at 1 AM.

Our hotel was pretty nice.  It was clearly built for tourists who come to the area for the mountains and the other nearby parks, including some of the gorilla reserves.  It was called the White House.  All over Africa, you'll see odd name and brand appropriations by different small businesses.  I think I've seen a good half-dozen different stores called the "Facebook Somethingorother" in different countries.  I guess it's aspirational and meant to karmically bring success, like a small start-up in the US that only has clients in one town calling itself "Smith Global" or "World Trade Partners" or something.  Realizing that I'd neglected to pack toilet paper, I made a small appropriation of my own from the room.  Don't worry, I left plenty for the next guest.

We slept for a few hours, then got up at a reasonable time so that we could begin preparations for the mountain itself.  Some gear was left behind in Nairobi, so we had to get crampons and ice axes locally.  This started a small odyssey unto itself wherein I learned the value of reliable local contacts.  Our local guy knew he was our only contact and that we had no one else to assist us in getting around the area, so he used it to his full advantage.  He opened the day by trying to charge us $100 to rent the gear, which is enough to buy a good, brand new axe in the US.  We talked him down to the less outrageous $50, but this was only the start.  Later, at the park, he wanted to skim three full days' worth of our park entrance fee for his "services", but we were able to get him down to two with us paying for yet another full day of park entrance fee.  Somehow, we still ended up short of two days in the park at the park gates (I believe those days' fees went to the park itself), so we theoretically had to complete the week-long trip in five days, which is very hard.

Part of our challenge was that I had hired a Kenyan guide, rather than a local Ugandan, to do the mountain.  A very recent change to the rules treats all outside guides as tourists who have to pay full entrance fees, rather than the minimal guide entrance fees.  That ate up our entire reserve fund for the trip.  We spent the first few days of the climb sweating about how we were going to be able to tip the crew and still buy our bus tickets home.

Thankfully?, the crew was bad.  None of the other climbing teams, all of whom used local Ugandan guides, appeared to have the same problems we did.  I think the solo trip combined with the outside guide really caused problems for us.  Other countries are also apparently trying to drive away outside guides to keep the tourism money entirely within the local community.  Small numbers make you vulnerable, and when you're someplace that isn't the home of any member of your team, you kind of have to play ball, no matter how bad the other side in a negotiation is being.  The park had also just changed its rules to require guides from the Kasese-based Ruwenzori Mountaineering Services for all technical ascents, so we had to hire a local guide as well.  We planned to hire a single porter for the food and cook gear, but the park wouldn't let us in without four.  We were really sweating our dwindling money.  The standard tip for porters in the area is apparently $5/day (so about UGX 12,500/day, or UGX 300,000 for four porters for six days, plus the Ugandan guide's tip, which "should've" been another UGX 100,000; bus tickets for both of us were UGX 50,000).  My Kenyan guide had about UGX 2,000 left and I had a little over UGX 200,000.  We spent the first two days of the hike just trying to figure a way out of the mess without starting an incident, which would only be complicated if we were unable to complete the trek in the five paid days.  It ultimately took us six, and we knew it would be hard to avoid that right from the beginning.

Partially in our advantage was the bad service from our porter army.  They showed up well over three hours late (so about four hours after we'd arrived at camp) on our first day.  Between that and our transport day, we hadn't eaten a real meal in two days, so we were... tense.  Also concerned that, after being cleaned out by them and the park, they might have just not shown up and we would've had to abandon the trip.  The first thing they did when they arrived was to ask how much their tip would be at the end of the trip.  This would turn out to be a theme throughout the hike.  I told him that we'd take care of it at the end of the trip after I'd seen all the service I was going to get from them.  He warned me that the porters might not work (...they'd been paid for a week of work in full in advance) if they didn't think they'd be getting a good tip.  I told him that I'd only tip at the end after I knew what service I'd gotten.  He relented, they worked.  But the complaining and demanding of tips with the threat of dumping our gear and leaving persisted throughout the trek.

Besides being nearly out of money, it gave us a great pretext for giving them a small tip at the end.  More on that later.

Anyways, the Ruwenzoris are stunning, but you'll be venturing into an area with a rough history and a dislike of outsiders.  The mountain itself did turn out as awesome as promised.

--Jeremy

Mt. Kenya is EPIC: Blog #2

We ate early so we could go to sleep early.  We planned to wake up the following morning at 3:30, but woke up at 2:30 with excitement and nerves, so we got an early start.  This would turn out to be beneficial later.  The hike up to the actual climb was surreal.  Even though Mt. Kenya is very close to Nairobi, the skies are amazingly clear.  The starlight is cold and razor sharp, rather than dull and blurry as skies next to large cities often are.  We climbed under a nearly full moon, so large shadows were everywhere and the Lewis glacier, which we had to briefly cross, glowed under our crampons.

After scrambling over a scree field (which is reasonably precarious in the dark, even with headlamps), we reached the foot of the actual climb.  It looms.  However, you can see the start of your route fairly easily.  Thin and difficult faces make up much of the rock above you, but you can see the wide, eroded crack system filled with big, blocky handholds you'll be using to avoid most of them.  The climb is roundabout and involves several traverses to avoid the more difficult faces, but the extra climbing keeps you on a path that rarely gets above 5.5/3, which is reasonably physically easy.  The route ended up taking 14 pitches to complete, making it the longest climb I've ever completed.  It had also been quite some time since I had done a lot of "traditional" climbing (instead of clipping into preset bolts, you place little stoppers, devices called cams, and slings into and around different rock features to hold your rope and thereby you when you fall; it's more difficult and time- and energy- consuming while providing you with less secure placements that don't always hold when you fall, making it more psychologically challenging as well).  Even though most pitches were not overly physically difficult, 14 of them with a gear pack on your back adds up, making it a reasonably challenging climb, overall.

Because you're so high and exposed, the route can get under your skin and into your head.  The traverse pitches were the worst, because, even though I followed John on them (in other words, I was basically on a toprope that was securely anchored, so normally I would've been unlikely to have a long fall if I slipped), we only had a few placements on each pitch, so every fall would have turned into a 20-foot, dragging swing along jagged rocks.  If I'd fallen, the rope would've saved me, but I would have still needed to go to a hospital afterwards.

Over the years, my brain has developed some odd defenses against the mind games it otherwise likes to play in these situations.  Despite what you'd think, most climbers are as afraid of heights as everyone else.  With experience, we basically just learn different ways of dealing with the fear, ignoring it altogether, and gradually desensitizing ourselves to it.  The best technique I've learned is to just block out all of your surroundings that are more than three feet above or below you.  Creating this bubble works well, but it always takes me a while to get into this mindset, and I lose it if I stop doing long climbs for a while.  When this fails (...it did on Mt. Kenya...I kept looking down), my mind starts playing clips of my favorite funny scenes from different TV shows.  It's weird, but somehow the distraction it provides focuses my mind.  The challenge can then become suppressing wildly inappropriate laughter that might shake me off the wall.

Anyways, we got through the more hair-raising sections and made it to one of the final pitches, which is affectionately nicknamed "the Big Rough".  As you can probably figure out, it's the most difficult pitch of the route and comes close to the end of the climb.  It's probably only about 5.7/4 in difficulty, but it's completely vertical and has a section with sparse holds that requires you to pull onto a semi-detached face that hangs +1,000' over the valley below, making it committing and mildly terrifying.  Once you pull over the edge at the end, you get a nice ledge to stand on and you're only about three easy pitches from the top of the first peak.

The summit of the mountain is actually split into two distinct peaks, Batian and Nelion.  To reach Batian, the tallest, you have to first climb to Nelion, then downclimb/rappel two pitches into the narrow, snowy saddle between them ("The Gates of Mist"), and climb two and a half pitches back out to the true summit of the mountain.  We reached Nelion later than we'd originally planned (which can be attributed to my slow climbing), so we had a very light lunch and rested for a bit before pushing on to the final stretch of the climb.  There's actually a little aluminum shed that three people can sit/lay in to spend the night on the summit.  I imagine it's pretty cold.  Unfortunately for us, by the time we started out descent into the Gates of Mist, the afternoon weather was starting to move in.  Once we were down in the Gates, the wind picked up and snow started to fall on us.  On this mountain, you want to avoid the storms, not because they're violent, dangerous, and very cold as they are on other mountains, but just because the snow makes the rocks very slippery and unsafe to climb.  We were so close to the summit, we pushed on through the remainder of the climb in spite of it.

We actually teamed up with another pair of climbers to get from Nelion to Batian to make the climb a little safer.  Once we were down in the Gates, we had to pull on crampons to navigate it and the first pitch of climbing, which was mostly getting up a moderate and thin snowfield to the next belay station.  After that, it was a wet and mildly desperate scramble over boulders sitting on the narrow spine of rock that connected the two peaks.  It was another situation where a slip would have turned into a long, penduluming fall over rough terrain.  Weirdly, it helps when I just tell myself that I can't fall, so I don't.  Knowing that you can't slip makes you pay a lot more attention to not slipping.  Adrenal strength also helps.  It took a surprisingly long time to complete the climb to the summit, in large part because of the weather.  Thankfully, we weren't very cold.  It was only about 25F/-5C, so just staying active kept us pretty warm throughout.

Finally, after about eight or nine hours of climbing, we reached the short bouldering problem to the summit.  We each stayed on rope while we climbed the last 10-15 feet to the summit and took our necessary photos.  Between the crowded conditions (even with only four of us) in the summit area, the bad weather, and the long journey down, we didn't linger very long.  Crossing the Gates in either direction takes a while because of the snow, which requires the changing of foot gear, and because you have to climb back out on your return.  For better or worse, a steep and thin snowfield is the exit back onto Nelion.  It's difficult to protect against falls on it, and snow can sometimes just fall out from under you, but snow and ice that are only a few degrees below freezing are relatively stable, yet easy to sink axes and crampons into.  My guide *cough* neglected to pack an axe for me, so I went last after solid footholds had already been stomped into the snow and ice, just jamming my fingers into the soft snow for purchase.  It actually worked pretty well.

After that, it was just a long series of rappels back down the mountain.  One team that had been climbing up behind us for most of the day decided to turn around on Nelion instead of going all the way to Batian.  Batian is only 11 meters higher than its twin, so a lot of people don't think it's worth all the extra effort and risk.  Unfortunately, when a few teams are on a mountain, traffic jams can occur, especially on the way down when everyone is waiting to use the same rappel stations.  Traffic jams can be a pleasant experience, though.  It gave us time to talk and get to know each other and to take it easy after a long journey up.  Two of our rappelling compatriots were a Polish couple that does a large African mountain every four years, Mt. Kenya being the final of the tallest three for them to complete.  One of the others was a Tanzanian who was learning technical climbing to enhance his guiding credentials.  When the afternoon storm rolled in, instead of continuing on to Batian with us, they had turned around and gotten stuck in a windy notch partway through their rappel, where they had hunkered down and ridden out the weather for a few hours.  Our approach to the storm might not have been as um safe, but I think it was a more enjoyable experience.

We reached the foot of the climb as the sun was beginning to set.  By the time we'd recrossed the Lewis glacier and returned to the hut, it was basically dark.  Our original plan had been to walk down to intermediate camp and spend the night there, shortening our exit hike the following day, but after deliberations that lasted all of about a minute, we concluded that it was a stupid idea.  After 16 hours on the mountain, we were tired and not ready to navigate a scree field for a few hours in the dark.  We had dinner and went to bed.

To make it out of the park by the required time, we got up at 4:30 the next morning, numbly munched on a few breakfast biscuits (in the Commonwealth, that means "cookies"), and started to trudge down to the lower camps.  We had around 27 kilometers to cover by mid-afternoon, so we just wanted to get up and get it done.  We did.  We were happy to reach the car that was waiting for us.

A few hours later, I was back in Nairobi, taking a very satisfying shower and then enjoying a very satisfying night of sleep.

--Jeremy

Mt. Kenya is EPIC! Blog #1

So that was the most epic mountain I've ever climbed, and that was after doing Ruwenzori.  I realize I owe you a Ruwenzori blog, but we're talking about Mt. Kenya first.  Both of these mountains turned a little more epic than we'd originally planned, but Mt. Kenya has the higher good epic/bad epic ratio of the two.  Before getting to the mountain, I knew that there would be a significant amount of technical climbing required to reach the top, but the mountain itself is deceptive.

Mt. Kenya is about a three-hour drive from Nairobi along good highways, which makes it one of the easier of the Five to reach.  When you are about 45 minutes from the trailhead, you can see the mountain on the horizon.  It's huge, but it slopes gently, very gently, over an enormous footprint.  When the clouds shroud the summit, and they do on most afternoons, all you can see is what looks like a giant, mild shield volcano on the horizon.  However, when the clouds part, you finally see the angry spike of rock that holds Mt. Kenya's summit sticking out of the center of the mountain.  From a distance, it looks small when compared with the rest of the massif, which sprawls alone across the low and flat savannah.  Throughout all of the first day of the hike, you can barely see the tip of the peak peeking (giggle) over the foothills.  It takes until the very end of the second day to finally get to behold the summit crag in all of its intimidating grandeur.  It was cloudy when we reached the second camp, but a few hours later, when the clouds parted, suddenly I got a sense of how difficult the climb itself would be.

The trail that we walked over the first two days was very easy--Class 1 all the way.  Its only challenge is that it brings hikers to a very high elevation (close to 14,000') in a very short time, so many people get altitude sickness on the mountain; more so than on the other mountains of the Five.  I had an advantage in that I had been on Ruwenzori only five days before, so I was already reasonably well acclimated to the height.  I still felt the altitude a little, but a few members of the other teams felt pretty ill.  A couple teams actually decided to spend an extra day at the second camp before pushing on to the high camp and whichever peak on the mountain they were doing.

When the afternoon rains finally went away, the central spire of the mountain comes into full view and looms over the camp.  We approached the summit along the Sirimon route, which comes from the west, so the summit looked even more serious than it does from other directions.  The western side of the mountain is the side that gets the rainfall, so the face of the summit spire that... faces the second camp is filled with snow, ice, and rotten couloirs.  Thankfully, on the third day, we hiked around to the back side of the spire, giving us access to the dry side of the mountain.  This side receives relatively little snow and rainfall, so the rock faces leading to the summit are mostly clean and dry.  Otherwise, the entire climb would've been an uncomfortable and very difficult mixed climb with loose snow and ice, which is pretty unsafe.

As all roads lead to Rome, all Mt. Kenya trails lead to the same high camp, the Austrian Hut.  Whatever peak a team is doing, they all sleep in the same hut the night before their summit bid.  Oh right, did I mention that all popular African peaks have huts on them?  Not campsites, but actual buildings with bunk beds (with foam mattresses!) and roofs.  The mountains might be difficult, but sleeping isn't.  Usually, the higher you go, the more spartan the shelters become.  High camp on Ruwenzori is a low-roofed shack that people pack into like sardines to sleep for a few hours before starting their summit bid.  The Austrian Hut was the most comfortable of all the huts I've stayed in so far.  Warm, no drafts, thick and new foam mattresses.  It was cozy, which isn't a word you'd normally associate with a high camp.  Windswept, frozen insomnia is a little closer to the normal feeling.

All parties converge at this location because it is right in the heart of the mountain and provides easy access to all of Mt. Kenya's most prominent peaks.  The classic image of a mountain is basically a pyramid with a single, lonely peak.  However, most mountains have a few prominent points on them that are not separate enough to be considered distinct mountains.  Mt. Kenya has at least a dozen, most of which are technical.  Because the summit of the mountain is so technically challenging, many people hike up to Point Lenana, the third-highest peak on the mountain.  Pt. Lenana is easily walkable from the Austrian Hut, and many teams that have come to the mountain just to reach Pt. Lenana actually hike directly to it from the second camp.  It's no easy feat, since it's still well over 16,000' tall and requires fairly difficult acclimation to reach.  Most of the groups that I encountered on the mountain had come to Mt. Kenya just to reach this peak.

We finished our hike to the Austrian Hut very early on our third day, so the guide and I decided to hike it that afternoon to help ourselves to acclimate for the summit bid the following day.  Shortly after we arrived at the Austrian Hut and got unpacked, the winds picked up and clouds blew in.  While we were making our plans, it started snowing.  The guide, John, was concerned that I would not feel safe or comfortable trekking through the snow, but I told him that I'd spent most of the past few years of my life living and adventuring in the northern US and Canada.  He laughed, said OK, and off we went.  It took less than an hour to reach Pt. Lenana from high camp, so we enjoyed the summit for a little while before turning around.  The steep parks of this hike have been maintained with slick conditions in mind.  A cable handrail has been bolted to the rock face you walk alongside for much of the way, and handles made with rebar have been installed into the short rock face that you would otherwise have to climb.

After that, we went back to camp to eat and get ready for the climb the following day.

--Jeremy

Beginnings

When I first came to Africa, I'd only planned on doing the iconic Kilimanjaro.  I knew that there were other mountains in the Rift Valley area, but I was unaware of their concentration and grandeur.  Outside of east Africa, there actually are few high peaks.  South Africa and Lesotho have a few and Morocco has the Atlas Mountains, but that's about it.  The reason that there are so many tall peaks in this part of Africa when there are so few in much of the rest of the continent is the Rift Valley itself.  Here, three tectonic plates are literally pulling the continent apart, creating the valley itself.  Because of all of this tectonic activity, the whole area is peppered with volcanoes.  Most of them are stratovolcanoes, which means that they form in such a way that makes their structure very stable and very high.  Ruwenzori and Ras Dashen/Dejen are actually ordinary mountains, but the other three and many of their neighbors are all stratovolcanoes.  Thankfully, most of them have been dormant for a long time.  Technically, nearly all of them are still active, but it has been so long since many of them have erupted that mountains like Kilimanjaro are referred to as "senile" locally.  This is great when you want to climb them.  Lava complicates things.

When I'd originally started to plan these climbs, I thought that I would do a few of them in my spare time just to enjoy and explore the area.  What really started to change things was my "discovery" of Ruwenzori.  Kilimanjaro is a grand-looking mountain because of its incredible relief from the surrounding area--it stands about 15,000 feet above the surrounding plans and dwarfs Mt. Meru by almost 5,000 feet.  It's a gentle giant, though, sloping gradually up to its peak over what is basically a really long Class 1 trail.  Ruwenzori, not so much.  The Ruwenzori Range the towering, jagged overlord of the surrounding forest, with peaks that can only be achieved with technical rock climbing.  Its peaks are surrounded by glaciers (along with Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, it's one of the only three mountains in equatorial Africa to be permanently snow-capped and to have glaciers), which you have to cross (carefully) to even get to the climbing.  It has unique vegetation that looks like something out of an old sci-fi novel.  When I first saw pictures of it, it's one of the few mountains that I've seen and immediately thought "I NEED TO CLIMB THIS."

On top of this, it's great for my inner history nerd.  It's been known to Europeans since at least AD 150, when famous geographer Ptolemy referenced it as the "Mountains of the Moon."  Its modern name means something more like "the rain maker" or "the cloud king" according to Uganda's parks service.  Also, because some of the most devastating warfare of the past couple of decades was raging in large scale just across the border in the Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) until 2006 (and the Kivus still aren't overly peaceful), it is just starting to regain popularity with climbers and tourists, making it probably the least traveled of east Africa's grandest mountains.

Seeing this mountain inspired me to make more of a climbing project out of east Africa's mountains.  As all of this was going on, I was getting myself back together after some serious career setbacks had really shaken my confidence in my ability to get things done.  I'd graduated from law school and gotten licensed only to find myself in the worst job market for attorneys in US history.  To say the least, I hadn't gotten where I'd expected to out of law school, and I'd spent the time between then and now sending off hundreds (maybe thousands now?  I stopped counting) of job applications to no avail while working odd jobs not strongly related to my education.  It might seem minor when compared with problems that people experience in Africa every day, especially in the DRC where there basically is no economy and intermittent civil warfare is still a real problem, but it's enough to really shake a person's confidence and make them question what they are even trying to do.

However, after a couple of months in Africa, not only did my hair stop falling out, it started regrowing!  Also, being in a new location with new things to do helped me to get some perspective on the issues that I was dealing with at home so that I could find new solutions to them.  It helped me to reevaluate my priorities in life so that I could find satisfying work and a satisfying life when I got back.  I hadn't been pursuing climbing and mountaineering nearly as much as I could have just because I felt slack and unmotivated, which just made those problems worse.  Having a real project to work on has helped me to get restarted and has made normal work a lot easier.

Because I felt like Africa had given me a fresh start, I decided that I wouldn't just climb these mountains out of pure self-indulgence, but I would try to make the project help other people, especially Africans.  It might not be the most noble reason for doing it, but it's what I have.  I have my own personal reservations about how much good certain types of aid do, especially purely economic aid, but I do believe that money put in the right place can sustainably improve people's lives and the area that they live in.

It took me a while to find an organization that I thought would fit these criteria, but eventually I did.  Healthcare is great, especially research medicine, because it's not the sort of thing that helps an ineffective government to limp on without change (at least not as much as economic aid) and it creates extremely useful products that everyone can benefit from.  I chose AIDS because it's a disease that's crippling Africa's ability to grow and develop.  Depending on what source you read, infection rates in some African countries can be as much as 30%, which is mind-boggling to think about.  Without much access to healthcare, those people are all going to die, and pretty soon.  Imagine the effect nearly a third of the US dying in a few years would have on its life and economy.  That's an incredible waste of human life and potential.  The cost of AIDS treatment and the other incidental effects it has on an economy are debilitating.  Eliminating this hobble, or at least preventing it from being passed on in large numbers to a new generation, has the potential to reduce the burdens on these countries and to help them to develop.  I like solutions that get at the roots of problems, rather than ones that treat symptoms of a disease after it has taken hold (both in a literal and metaphoric sense).  Preventing AIDS transmission to children so that they won't need treatment and will survive seems like one of the ideal solutions to these problems.

Anyways, on Monday, I'll leave for Ruwenzori.  Originally, I'd planned to take the bus from Nairobi to Kasese in Uganda, where expeditions to Ruwenzori are launched from.  Unfortunately, since the Westgate Mall attack in September, Kenya's be reworking its border and visa regulations to the great irritation of its neighbors.  The new civil war in South Sudan and the way Kenyans in Juba have been treated is making Kenya feel even more isolationist.  Now, these neighboring countries are creating their own new restrictions on travel in response (this is my theory, anyways).  A few weeks ago, Uganda banned travel across its borders after dark, so I could not longer do the bus ride in a single, 16-hour push.  The costs that it added to the transportation and the extra day that it added made it more cost-effective just to hop on one of the cheap commuter flights between Nairobi and Uganda's capitol of Kampala.  The flight's an hour and fifteen minutes, compared with nearly ten hours by bus.  After I fly to Entebbe International, I just have to catch a bus into town where I can catch another bus to Kasese.  I'll still get to see a reasonable portion of the area overland, and I'll get a proper view of Lake Victoria because I'll be traveling through Entebbe.

Speaking of Ruwenzori, I need to start getting my gear ready and packed so that I can actually do it.

Jeremy