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Walking at the treeline of Mount Kenya

A cautionary tale from the slopes of Africa’s second highest mountain

By Remember the Goat

August 16^th, 2021

Just a little more than an hour’s drive south from Isiolo, along paved road, graded forest track and, eventually, a small dirt track, will get you high up onto the northern slopes of Mount Kenya. Here, at around 10,000 ft, the trees end, and moorland begins.

Sunburn and hypothermia

We were only about half an hour away from the pickup. It was so dry that our feet raised little clouds of dust as we walked along the animal trail. It was midday and the sun was out. We wandered up through the last of the trees and started pushing our way into the thick, giant heather. Some small clouds passed across the sun, but nothing significant. When the sun was hidden, even briefly, you could feel that the air temperature was much cooler than we were used to. Which is partly why I made my first mistake, the sunburn.

When you are on the lower lying plains, the heat presses against you like an unfriendly force. This is a constant reminder, for those of us with pale skin, to lather on the sun cream. Up here, at 10,000 feet, the air temperature is barely in double figures. In the sunshine temperatures are very pleasant, in the low to mid 20s C (low 70s F). The sun no longer feels like it is hammering against your skin, so it is easy to forget to re-apply the sun cream. Of course, the equatorial sun is just as strong here as below, and you burn just as quickly.

For 20 minutes we pushed through thickly overgrown animal paths, me not seeing anything, Kitonga (at 6’2”) seeing very little more. We were just deciding whether to venture down into the next valley or not, when a couple of fat drops of rain fell on us. Looking up there was a small patch of cloud just brushing the edge of the sun, I turned away unconcerned. Perhaps we would sit under the heather for a while and let it pass. More drops of rain fell, and some hail. Then across the valley, seemingly out of nowhere, thick sheets of rain appeared and started drifting towards us. Thunder cracked the sky, and the rain and hail became a downpour.

Within minutes we were drenched. Not just wet, but sodden. Mountain or no, this is still the equator, and the rain is still going to fall with tropical intensity. That is where any sense that we were in the tropics ended though, this rain was cold. The sun was now gone. Thick cloud, bands of rain and growing mist, turning the bright day dark. The air temperature quickly dropping even further with the cold down drafts from the thunderstorm. We turned to fight our way back through the dripping heather. Before we had gone very far the animal track we were following was an inch deep in water, the hail floating in it unmelting.

Of course, we were dressed for a short stroll on a sunny afternoon. I was wearing walking sandals, sturdy but my feet were bare in them. I had a denim jacket in my bag, in case it got a bit chilly, but otherwise I was just wearing light weight trousers and a t-shirt. Kitonga was dressed much the same but had leather shoes on. This small difference quickly became a big one.

After ten minutes of being submerged in the icy water I could no longer feel my feet. Pushing through the wet cold branches was tearing at my skin, so I had donned the jacket, in my haste fastening the buttons up wrong, but my hands were already too cold to undo it and start again. I was beginning to get seriously concerned.

I have had mild hypothermia once before and, tellingly, that was also in August, though in the Scottish Highlands. We had set out to do a couple of Munros (Scottish mountains over 3000 ft) connected by a ridge. It was a hot sunny summer day, when, seemingly out of nowhere, it started snowing. We were not completely unprepared. You know that the weather can be very unpredictable in the Scottish mountains. None the less we didn’t have full winter kit with us and it took a while to get off the ridge. In that time my temperature must have plummeted. I became very clumsy, and if we stopped moving I shook badly. Once we were down my companion told me I had been saying some mighty strange things. It took me a long time to warm back up again.

When you have no feeling in your feet, walking becomes much less natural. I started stumbling more easily and I was very conscious that I didn’t want to compound our troubles by falling badly. Kitonga was keen to keep us moving with as much speed as possible, he didn’t want to tell me, but my lips had gone blue. Of course, we also didn’t want to walk slap bang into a buffalo or elephant either. In such dense bush, with so little visibility, that could easily happen and be fatal. With the rain and hail drowning out all sound and obscuring footprints, we were now even more likely to go blundering into them, so care was needed.

The return journey took nearly an hour. Luckily, we were not complete idiots. When we made it back to the pickup we quickly stripped out of sodden clothes and put on the dry things that we had packed in case of emergencies. Even this though, was by now a struggle. Kitonga’s hands were so cold it took him several minutes to get the car keys out of the sodden pocket of his jeans. Once in the car, and in dry clothes, we had hot drinks from the flasks we had brought and ate the lunch we had packed.

The rain and hail continued to pour down and we were not out of the woods yet. The rough dirt track up the mountain is notoriously impassable when wet, the soil here becomes so slick that traction is impossible. We needed to get out soon before it was too late. The drive down was touch and go in a few places. There is a new dent in the door where the pickup slid unstoppably into a high bank. But as Kitonga has proved on more than one occasion, he is a master at off-road driving, and we got back to the main forest track with no more than stress and a muddy (slightly dented) vehicle to show for it.

An hour later, back down in the dry and dusty plains. Back in the late afternoon heat. It was almost impossible to believe what had just happened. Earlier in the day we had both received our second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine at Isiolo Hospital. At 9am it had already been very warm. By 4am we were once again sitting in the comfortable heat of the tail end of the day. Had we really got so cold and wet in between that I feared we might get hypothermia? That if one of us had slipped and broken an ankle, on that steep muddy animal trail, we could have been in very serious trouble. No, it seemed quite unbelievable. There were a couple of photographs though, and when I picked up the wet clothes, bundled into the back of the car in haste more than an hour before, they felt like they had just come out of the fridge. My face was also a little sore with sunburn.