The Mountains of the Moon: Climbing the Rwenzori

Almost two thousand years ago, a Greek geographer wrote of a range of snow-capped mountains deep in Africa that fed the source of the Nile, and called them the Mountains of the Moon. For centuries, the idea was dismissed as myth; snow on the equator seemed impossible until European explorers finally reached the Rwenzori in the late nineteenth century and found that the legend was true. Rising on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Rwenzori Mountains hold glaciers and permanent snow almost exactly on the equator, and climbing them is one of the great and least-known adventures in Africa.

The range the ancients dreamed of

The Rwenzori are not volcanoes like Kilimanjaro or the Virungas but a genuine mountain range, uplifted block of ancient rock, and they are crowned by the third-highest peak in Africa. Unlike the free-standing giants that dominate the East African skyline, the Rwenzori are a jagged, glaciated massif of multiple peaks, permanently wrapped in cloud and mist, which is part of why they stayed hidden from the outside world for so long.

That cloud is the key to the whole experience. The mountains generate their own weather, drawing moisture up from the surrounding forests and releasing it as near-constant rain and mist, which feeds the glaciers and the rivers and creates a landscape unlike anywhere else on earth. To climb the Rwenzori is to walk up through that weather, from steaming forest at the bottom to snow and ice at the top, and to understand at last why the ancients dreamed of them.

A climb through impossible vegetation

What sets the Rwenzori apart from every other mountain in Africa is not the summit but the journey to it, and specifically the vegetation you pass through, which is genuinely bizarre. As you climb, you move through a series of distinct zones, and the higher ones look like nothing else on the planet.

You begin in dense montane forest, alive with primates and birds. Higher up you enter a zone of bamboo, then a strange world of giant heather hung with moss and lichen, and then, higher still, the famous Afro-alpine zone where the plants have evolved into forms that seem invented for a fantasy film. Giant lobelias stand like alien sentinels, and groundsels grow into towering, otherworldly trees, all wreathed in mist and dripping with moss, the ground a treacherous bog underfoot. Travellers who have climbed mountains all over the world describe the Rwenzori’s upper vegetation as the strangest and most beautiful they have ever walked through. It is worth the climb for the plants alone.

The honest difficulty

The Rwenzori are demanding, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, because the difficulty is a large part of why so few people go. This is not a walk-up like some of Africa’s other peaks. The trails are steep, and above all they are wet, endless mud and bog, slippery roots and rock, river crossings and rain, which makes the going hard and the days long.

Reaching the highest snow-capped summits requires genuine mountaineering, including glacier travel and technical skills, and is only for experienced climbers with the right equipment and guides. But there is good news for the rest of us. Shorter treks of a few days climb high into the extraordinary vegetation zones and to spectacular viewpoints without the technical summit, giving most of the magic of the range to any reasonably fit and determined walker. The mountains reward effort in proportion, and even the lower treks are among the most memorable walks in Africa.

What the mountains ask, and give

A Rwenzori trek is a wilder, tougher, lonelier thing than the region’s more famous climbs, and that is precisely its appeal. Where other peaks see long queues of climbers, the Rwenzori see very few, so you walk in near-solitude through a landscape scarcely touched, sleeping in simple mountain huts, guided and portered by people from the communities at the foot of the range for whom the work is a vital livelihood.

The reward is not just the summit or the viewpoints but the whole strange, saturated, primeval world you pass through, and the sense of having reached somewhere genuinely remote and rarely seen. It is Type Two fun, hard in the doing and glorious in the memory, and climbers who take it on almost always rank it among the great experiences of their lives, precisely because it asks so much and is so little known. The IUCN and UNESCO recognise the range as a World Heritage site for its extraordinary and threatened ecosystems, its glaciers now retreating fast with the warming climate.

The vanishing snows

There is an urgency to the Rwenzori that is worth knowing before you go. The glaciers that made the mountains legendary are melting, and quickly. The permanent ice that has crowned these equatorial peaks for millennia has shrunk dramatically over the past century and is projected to disappear within a generation, which means the snow-capped Mountains of the Moon may not be snow-capped for very much longer.

To climb them now, while the ice still clings to the high peaks, is to see something that future travellers will only read about, exactly as the ancients once did. There is a poignancy in that, and a reason not to wait, because the mountains that were once a myth of snow on the equator are, within our lifetimes, at risk of becoming a myth again.

For the traveller who wants more than a game drive

The Rwenzori are not for everyone, and they are not a substitute for a safari but a complement to one, the wild, physical, adventurous counterpoint to the gorillas and the plains. For the traveller with a mountaineer’s heart, who wants to earn their views and walk where almost no one goes, they are one of the last great adventures in East Africa.

A Rwenzori trek pairs naturally with the wildlife of western Uganda, the gorillas and the chimps and the savannah parks, giving a trip both the stillness of the forest and the challenge of the mountains. For a company built around going beyond the ordinary, this is the definition of it, snow and glaciers and alien plants on the equator, in a range the ancient world could only dream of. You can see how it fits across our Uganda destinations.

If you want to climb the Mountains of the Moon while the snows still hold, tell us, and we will build the right Rwenzori trek, at the right level, into your Uganda adventure.