Wrecked in the Rwenzoris (Climbing in the Mountains of the Moon)
on Random Uganda (Uganda), 08/Mar/2010 08:28, 34 days ago
for more pictures of the hike“Born to walk on pavement.”—Anonymous. (scrawled in charcoal on the wall of the Kitandara Hut, 4023 meters above sea level [ASL] in the Rwenzori National Park)I have hiked and climbed in many places in this world, some of them paved, most not, but I have never felt my senses of balance and proprioception tested like this past week trekking the central circuit of the Rwenzoris. Apparently, given the graffito above, I am not alone.I think in a previous posting, I mentioned the 1990 movieMountains of the Moon. Reference to the Mountains of the Moon first appeared in Ptolemy’s Geography. Ptolemy or Ptolemaeus (a Greek guy, citizen of the Roman empire, living in Egypt in the first century AD) noted that the trader Diogenes got lost on his way back from India and landed in Rhapta in East Africa from where he traveled west for 25 days until he found a giant, snow-covered mountain range which he dubbed the Mountains of the Moon, and the source of the Nile. Diogenes, many believe, may have been the first european to view what is now known as the Rwenzori Mountain Range. Many others, however, believe that Diogenes was a fabricating sack of dog poop.In either case, the Uganda Wildlife Authority UWA) refers to the Rwenzoris as the Mountains of the Moon, and the area has been given National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Herbert, my ever-so arrogant RMS lead guide still holds to Diogenes’ otherwise universally disregarded assertion that the snows of the Rwenzoris are the source of the Nile. The Rwenzori Mountaineering Service (RMS) has a monopoly on guiding in the Rwenzoris. So if you want to go hiking or climbing in the Rwenzoris, you will need to talk to Elisha or Jerome (‘tourist officers’ for the RMS), or, most likely, both of them… many times.As a wannabe climber hanging in East Africa, naturally I have thought long and hard about climbing Kilimanjaro (5895 meters ASL)—the legendary dormant giant volcano in Tanzania that towers to Uhuru peak, Africa’s high point. But I must admit to being put off by the thought of climbing in the company of hundreds (about 15,000 people try to climb Kili a year: 40% of them succeed, on average 10 of them die) of my fellow tourists, most of them nauseated with altitude sickness, on wet-wipe littered hiking routes that require little or no mountaineering skill. Don’t get me wrong, it may be a walk up Kili, but it is a long and strenuous walk to a very high altitude and anyone who has made this walk should rightly feelproud of their achievement. But, in the end, I set my sights on a lower, slower (only about 200 people climb in the Rwenzoris each year), and more local summit: Margherita Peak of Mount Stanley (5109 meters ASL)—highest point in Uganda, third highest peak in Africa, and home to what will soon bethe last remaining glaciers in Africa.And so, after many phone calls (hint: don’t even bother with the email), and after many changes in dates and plans (the dry season, theoretically, ends the first half of march, so I was under some time constraints trying to get a trip planned, and Elisha was trying to tag me onto to a group of American climbers, but they canceled, so heput me in with a Polish team), and after a 12 hour bus experience, I found myself in Kasese at the Sandton Hotel having dinner with my four new trekking/climbing partners: Pavel, Magda, Janocz, and Janocz.Magda is a second year psychiatry resident at the Mayo clinic. She would find herself, later in the week, in the position of interpreter, moderator, and voice of reason ('I have absolutely no testosterone.') for the group. Her father, Pavel, and the two Janoczs had traveled together and climbed Kilimanjaro in the past ('My father says there was nothing this hard on Kilimanjaro.' Magda would confide later). Magda had a brand new ice axe and pair of crampons in her pack.The next morning, before breakfast, I met Herbert and we took a walk to the Bata shop to purchase the essential piece of Rwenzori mountaineering equipment: a pair of rubber boots. I opted for the 19000 shilling boots with the molded heel and tread as opposed to the more slippery soled 12000 shilling model. The extra 7000 shillings would turn out to be a worthwhile investment. Even so, the boots still had less padding under the balls of my feet than my flip-flops. I tried to have a conversation with Herbert about the conditions in the mountains, but couldn’t get him to contribute more than a few grunts and an enigmatic ‘it will be very wet and very hard.’ More than anything, he seemed annoyed that he’d had to get up 15 minutes early to make this errand.I have been fortunate to climb with some excellent mountain guides. In the early stages of an expedition, most guides would be trying get some idea from the clients as to just exactly what their level of climbing skills were, so as to make an assessment on whether they were suitable to take into the mountains and what additional safety or climbing gear might be needed. Herbert had no such curiosity. He soon decided that the Poles could not understand what he said, so he addressed all of his comments to me—expecting me to tell the rest of the climbing team what to expect. Fortunately, Magda was able to re-direct.After breakfast we loaded up the gear and drove an hour on a dirt road out of Kasese into the mountains to the village of Nyakalengijo. At the RMS headquarters we were greeted by over a hundred men in rubber boots with their faces pressed through the gaps in the bamboo fencing. According the RMS fee schedule, the climbing fees include one guide and two porters per climber. The village men have been lining up here to carry loads into the mountains for over a hundred years since theDuke of Abruzzi came to climb the peaks of the Rwenzoris in 1906. It is not mentioned just how many men were involved in the first ascents in the range, although initially the string of porters was over a half a kilometer long. It also isn’t mentioned how many of the porters died on the initial expedition, but Herbert said that at least 3 fell to their deaths trying to ascend the Kicucu cliffs, the new path discovered by the Duke’s guides into the heart of the Rwenzoris.I have some mixed feelings about using porters. Part of me feels the need to have the packstraps digging in around my shoulders to get the full-on masochistic climbing experience. The other part of me wishes the porters would carry up lawn chairs and a pony keg as well. But since the mines closed in the 60s and all of the game has been killed off, portering is one of the few opportunities for employment in the foothills, so I feel okay letting them carry my pack as a contribution (however small for the toil involved) to the local economy. The porter who gets my pack lucks out—it is a good five kilos under the 18 kg limit (maybe I should have brought more warm clothes).For our first day we walk from Nyakalengijo to Nyabitaba camp (1600m-2651m). Herbert says it will take us a maximum of four hours. It takes us five. We walk with Nehemiah and Jomad, Hebert’s two subsidiary guides, who might speak English, but since they never opened their mouths, it was hard to tell. Jomad would walk a random number of steps (4-17), and then stop abruptly and turn to see if we were still following. Invariably we were. After bumping into him from behind on several occasions I learned not to follow Jomad too closely.We walked along the Mobena river through a forest of moss drenched cedar and giant ferns. The occasional massive banana tree loomed unasked for by the side of the trail. We could hear monkeys in the trees and catch glimpses of them in the canopy. But we never got enough of a view to identify them as the rare red rwenzori colobus monkey as opposed to the usual black ones. At one point in time, the bush elephant roamed the foothills. It would have been an amazing thing to run into an elephant on a climbing trip, but they were killed off in the 70s or 80s, so it was not to be.We reached the Nyabitaba hut just as the rain starts. An Austrian climber, Franc, has beaten us there. A rain-sodden Japanese team of four photo/video journalists dragged in just before dark and promptly set up their camera and start filming us taking our tea on the veranda (if you happen to be watching the Japanese Discovery channel next year and see a documentary on climbing in the Rwenzoris, please post it on You-tube and let me know). Franc and the Japanese will be the only Mzungus we encounter during our week in the mountains.Pavel and the Janocz, in their limited English (but, much less limited than my Polish) show me why their packs are so much bigger than mine. They are loaded with Polish Cheese and Sausage and nearly a gallon of pre-mixed Margaritas. We toast irridescent green tequila containing substance to the peak we will never truly see:‘Margherita!’Rwenzori comes from the Bakonjo (Bakonzo?—one of the two local tribes that make up the recently established Rwenzururu kingdom, a splinter of the Toro kingdom) language and roughly translates as ‘place from where the rains come.’The rains come down in earnest on our second day’s walk from Nyabitaba to John Matte hut (2651m-3505m). Herbert says the walk will take us a maximum of seven hours. It takes us eight. You may be picking up a trend here. We descend off the ridge to cross the Mobutu river just below its junction with the Bujuku river—both running brown andhigh with the recent influx of rain and mud. We criss-cross the Bujuku on increasingly more fragile bridges as we wander through a bamboo forest and then into thickets of mossy rhodedendron looking trees. Again, Jomad leads the way in his walk-stop, walk-stop hokey-pokey, but today he throws in the additional movement of bending over to probe the mud holes with his iceaxe. He doesn’t let us know the findings of his soundings, but we quickly learn to follow where his boots have gone.That evening, waiting for the Japanese team to drag in with their embarrasingly long train of porters (carrying, among other things, a portable generator), the clouds break and we see a waxing moon, a few stars and our first sighting of Mount Baker (4843m). Herbert announces that the weather is changing and that tomorrow will be clear. The rain pounding on the corrugated metal roof wakes us at 5 am.In Herbert’s defense, the third day’s walk from John Matte to Bujuku Hut (3505m-3962m) was relatively rainfree and there was a 20 second interval of sunshine. We crossed the Lower and Upper Bigo Bogs—huge expanses of wetland with African mountain swampgrass (carax runzorensis) and helichchrysis (a Labrador Tea looking shrub with closed up white flowers) interspersed with Giant Lobelias and Giant Groundsel trees. It was a surreal, other-worldly sort of landscape—beautiful but not quite graspable. The lower bog had a one-year old board walk, raised on plastic barrels with randomly spaced boardsto keep your attention on your feet. The upper bog’s boardwalk had partially rotted away and was sunk beneath the surface of the swamp making the bog crossing problematic and messy.Without the aid of a boardwalk, the porters each set their own path across the bogs, as using a single path would have quickly churned a waste deep trough of mud. If you were a wetlands conservationist, you would be driven to tears, or violence, at the destruction caused just by our group of travelers.Hopping from tussock to tussock, with occasional slips into the boot-top deep mud, we made our way around the shore of Lake Bujuku to the Bujuku camp. At dusk, the clouds lifted just high enough to tease us with views of Mount Speke (4890m) to our north, Mount Baker to the south and Mount Stanley to the west. Herbert prognosticated that the weather was good and tomorrow would be clear.The next morning Herbert told us that Nehemiah was suffering from altitude sickness and was heading back to base camp. Needless to say, this was an omen that didn’t bode well for our little group. Not only were the guides unacclimatized, but now we were left with only two guides, neither of whom really liked to talk to us. It would seriously limit our climbing and rescue options. Not that the rescue options were very good to begin with. The Rwenzori Rescue Plan (RRP) is, well, you die. Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that—if there’s an emergency, one of the guides will return to a point where they can get mobile phone service (Nyabitaba hut or lower, if they have battery life, or airtime) and call a rescue team which will proceed on foot to the injured or sick climber. (even in good weather, neither of the two civilian helicopters in Uganda could make it that high into the Rwenzoris) So basically you would wait 2-3 days for a rescue party. Like I said, you die.Franc, the lone Austrian, and his guide had decided that the weather would be clear as well and they would go for the summit from the Bujuku hut (as opposed to the higher Elena hut), so the fourth day started with the sounds of Franc’s alarm watch in addition to the driving rain on the tin roof at 4:30 am. Unfortunately, Franc couldn’t find his guide, so he rewoke us coming back to bed. Franc and his guide would leave about seven.We continued our trek—from Bujuku Hut to Elena Hut (3962m-4541m)—in a drizzle, up hill through the bog until we hit rainslick granite and quartz boulders which gradually transform into cliff faces. Still wearing our rubber boots, we began to make progressively more technical rock climbing moves. In the rock-climbing vernacular, this would be called ‘pretty freakin’ gnarly, dude.’ But in layman’s language, you would have to call this a recipe for disaster.So naturally, while walking along a tiny ledge, Pavel slips. Luckily, he manages to grab the ledge as he slides by, because the alternative would have been a long, bone-crushing fall. Herbert’s reaction to this is: ‘sorry’ along with a contemptuous look that indicates he thinks Pavel is clearly retarded for not being able to negotiate a two inch crack while wearing hip-waders. We manage to get Pavel up to a safe flat spot, but he isn’t moving his right arm. On examination he has a dislocated shoulder. (Oh, no, I can hear you say, enough with the dislocated shoulders… Okay, so it is basically a party trick, but, hey, if you only have one trick, it’s good that the people getting hurt around you are cooperative enough to play into it)We (Pavel and I, Herbert seems to think that Pavel is faking not being able to move his arm) manage to get Pavel’s shoulder relocated and get him up to the Elena hut otherwise unscathed. I suggested to Herbert that we at least get a harness on Pavel and get him short-roped to someone, but, as you might expect, Herbert had nothing of the sort in his pack. Neither, I am sad to say, did I—one problem withletting the porters carry all your gear.I haven’t been able to identify the Elena that the Elena hut is named after. When the hut was first put up nearly fifty years ago, the glaciers started at the front door. Now they have retreated to small crescents on the horizon and a slippery rock face slopes down to the cabin. Two rock pillars guardthe entrance to Mount Stanley: Nyabibuya to the left and Kitsemba to the right—named for to Bakonzo deities thought to reside in the mountains and strike down those who perform acts contrary to the cultural norm (i.e. mountain climbing).Somewhere a little further up in the hanging clouds lurks Margherita peak.Pavel initially thinks that the rocks may dry up, and that he will continue the climb. But our general anxiety over what has happened to Franc, who we last saw in the early morning, supersedes further discussion. According to the guides, Franc should have been down hours ago. I ask Herbert is he has been in contact with Robert, Franc’s guide. He tells me that their cell phones won’t work up here. I ask if we should start putting a party together to go up and look for Franc. He looks at me like I’m deranged.Just as the last vestiges of light are disappearing, Franc and Robert appear on the ridge top and start slipping down the rocks. The summit attempt that Herbert says should take a maximum six hours has taken them eight. Pavel asks Franc about the advisability of trying for the summit using one hand. Franc smiles and shakes his weary head. No.Pavel, Magda and the Janoczs sit down with their remaining bottle of Margarita and confer. They decide that, in the morning, they will all head down to Kitandara Hut with Jomad. That leaves me and Herbert to make the try for Margherita. Herbert looks at the momentarily clear sky and tells me that we will have good weather in the morning. He announces we will leave at five. I tell him that I won’t be doing the rock face above the camp in the dark if it is raining. He says it won’t be raining. The weather has told him all he needs to know.0400: wake to pounding rain on the tin roof0415: Elisha, our cook, puts a thermos of hot water on the table (I stay in my sleeping bag)0430: Elisha puts French toast on the table and tells me breakfast is ready (I still stay in my bag)0445: Elisha comes and shines his head light in my face and tells me breakfast is ready (still in bag)0450: Herbert comes in and shines his light in my face and says that the weather is good and we’ll leave at five. (still in bag)0500: I get out and dressed and just about kill myself in the slippery fog outside the hut trying to pee. I find Herbert and reiterate my statement of the night before about not climbing the rock face in the dark when it’s raining.0700: The sun starts to cast a dim light through the low clouds and the drizzling rain. I get up and dressed again, eat some cold French toast and go looking for Herbert.0745: We head up the hill.Words that you really don’t want to hear from your mountain guide: ‘Can you put the rope in your pack?’Something that makes these words more frightening: you notice that he’s not bringing a pack. (Usually on summit day, the guide has the biggest pack—he/she will be carrying the rope, the climbing gear [including appropriate snow or rock anchors] and survival gear, in addition to the usual food, water and extra clothing) Herbert has a couple of beeners and an ATCon his harness, nothing else. I’m carrying a backpack designed to carry my laptop, stuffed to capacity.Something that makes it even worse: the rope he hands you isn’t even a legitimate climbing rope, its 7 or 8mm cord.I foolishly ignore all the warning lights and sirens going off in my head (it is hard, after slogging uphill through mud for four days, to suddenly let go of the climb a few hours short of the peak) and follow Herbert up the slick rocks above camp. All I can think of as we shimmy up the rock face into the face of the small cascades of rainwater is just how scary it will be to come down. But we manage to make the ridge top and the lower edge of Stanley glacier.Mount Stanley, in case you were wondering, was named for Henry Morton Stanley, of the‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ fame. Stanley, a Welsh journalist, explorer, and mercenary who managed to fight for (and desert from) both sides of the American civil war, led an expedition into the interior of Africa to rescue the Emin Pasha and in 1889 was with the first modern Europeans to seethe Rwenzoris.We rope up. I put a rescue coil (extra rope to lower into a crevasse) at my end of the rope. Herbert doesn’t. I rig up my prussics for crevasse self-rescue. Herbert looks on in bored disinterest. Herbert probably weighs 50kg with all his gear. Me, 85. I might be able to pull Herbert out of a crevasse. There would be no chance in hell of Herbert pulling me out. I suspect that his plan for the event of my crevasse fall would be to cut the rope and move on.We are now climbing over 5000 meters and the air is scarce. I am panting like an overheated Saint Bernard. We traverse the Stanley Glacier and the buttress for Alexandra Peak and head up Margherita Glacier into a snowstorm. I don’t know if you remember the scene in the mountains from The Fellowship of the Ring where Legolas, the elf, is walking on top of the snow while the rest of the party pushes through waist deep snow, but this is how I felt on the glacier—Herbert walked easily on top of the crust while I broke through up to my knees. Herbert kept tugging on the rope and turning to look at what was wrong with me.There were some rickety ladders blowing in the wind at the peak. I used a prussic for a margin of safety on the frayed fixed line and we manage the remaining climb to the summit. I had hoped for some view of the Rwenzoris from the top, but it was not to be. I could see a couple hundred feet down the ridge, and that was all. I snapped a few pictures, and we got the hell out of there.I was walking first down the Margherita Glacier as it flowed over a hump in the mountain—a decompression zone in the glacier where cracks and crevasses form. Herbert chose this moment to shorten the distance between us by holding several coils of rope in his hand—increasing the risk of both of us falling into the same crevasse, and ensuring that if I did fall, the speed and depthof my fall would be exponentially increased by the length of rope in his hand. Fortunately, most of the crevasses were fairly well defined and of jumpable width. Unfortunately, Herbert had the annoying habit of yanking the rope taught just as I would start to make the jump over a crevasse, stopping my forward momentum and nearly dropping me in the crevasse on several occasions.We managed to get down the glaciers without further incident. At the final rock face, Herbert unroped, despite my suggestion that we stay roped up until the hut. He clearly did not trust my rock-climbing skills enough to want to be tied into me on this part of the descent. I stooped to take off my crampons, but he indicated I should leave them on. Granted, the rain was still sheeting down and the rocks were slippery, but I didn’t think the crampons were going to make them any less so. A bit later, as we made a traverse around a large boulder in a narrow crack, I leaned just a bit to far into the rock, and the width of my boots levered the relatively narrower crampons out of the crack and I slid for nine or ten feet down the rock into a heap at the bottom. I took my crampons off.Adrenaline, and a thorough understanding of the Rwenzori Rescue Plan, got me to my feet and down to the hut and, a bit later, down to the Kitandara Hut (4023m), where I could finally sit down and make an assessment: right leg—one huge coalescing bruise from the hip down to the ankle; right knee—sore, creaky, but no unstable ligaments; right ankle—swollen, purple, but stable and probably not broken; left knee—sore but stable. I am dehydrated (Herbert drank over half my water on the summit climb as he brought none of his own) and starving.Pavel and the other climbers had made it safely off the wet rock and were enjoying the relatively warmer weather and the beautiful lake at the lower hut.The next day we climbed back up over 4000 meters into Freshfield pass and took one last fleeting look at Mount Baker and Mount Luigi di Savoia (the Duke of Abruzzi). And then descended gingerly to the Guy Yeoman Hut (3450m). Ski poles and consistent doses of ibuprofen kept me upright. The final day we descended under the cliffs of the Kicucu rock shelter and down into the bogs to enjoy the sensation of mud overflowing the boot-tops one final time before rejoining the trail just above the Nyabitaba hut and making the descent back to Nyakalengijo.I bought the porters a well-deserved round or two of warm drinks at the base-camp tavern. Strangely enough the number of porters suddenly expanded.Herbert told the Polish climbers that‘next time they would reach Margherita Peak.’ Magda translated and they all started laughing. What was said in Polish was no doubt something like ‘not a chance in hell will there be a next time.’I have to agree. I am glad that I hiked the circuit in the Rwenzoris. Even in pouring rain the landscape and mountainscape is unique and beautiful around every muddy bend in the trail. But I am also glad that I won’t have to do it again.The2006 bookDon’t climb Kilimanjaro (Climb the Ruwenzori)will no doubt increase the traffic of hikers and climbers into a park where infrastructure is not in place to protect the environment and the guides and the rescue systems are not prepared to keep the hikers from harm. This is too bad. My recommendation would be that if you do wish to climb in the Rwenzori, unless you are an expert climber, that you travel with one of the several groups per year that bring their own European mountain guides.In Kasese I said my goodbyes and shook hands with Herbert.‘I feel fortunate to have survived climbing with you.’ It was hard to read any more into his fixed facial expression of general disdain. I’m sure he was thinking, ‘likewise.’