Mt Longonot Nationwide Park

Mt Longonot Countrywide Park is positioned about 90km from Nairobi and provides a amazing hiking chance for the hale and hearty. Labelled by Kenya Wildlife Support as “Sheer Journey”, it definitely can really feel like that as you traverse the slender monitor all over the rim with quite minimal concerning you and a steep slide either down the mountain or into the crater.

Positioned around Naivasha in the Rift Valley Province and Central Kenya region, Mt Longonot addresses an spot of 52 square kilometres. It rises 643 metres from foundation (2146m over sea degree) to summit (2789m).

It can be a fairly steep ascent for about 3km from the base to the crater rim – it was a volcano. You can then choose to circumnavigate the entire crater rim, which is approximately 7km, before descending back to the base. From the prime you have expansive sights of the Terrific Rift Valley and Lake Naivasha. Guides and porters are offered upon ask for.

Being this sort of an simple working day journey from Nairobi, one particular sunny Saturday a team of us made the decision to go. It was the starting of a training regime to put together us for climbing Mt Kenya. I have determined that Mt Kenya will have to wait around a while – my (un-) conditioning level was embarrassingly exposed on Mt Longonot! On weekends Mt Longonot is a really preferred outing for many Nairobians and we observed folks of all ages working and going for walks on the mountain – elderly adult men, training athletes and a swarm of little ones participating in a sponsored action. As a result the route up to the rim was practically like a highway and the initially position you reach at the best was crowded. Thankfully most were merely climbing up to appreciate the see from that position and then descending.

As we had all working day, and we figured 7 km was not also much, we determined to get the observe about the crater rim. I supposed that 7km was not much too considerably on flat ground, and I supposed the crater rim would be fairly flat. I was incorrect on the two counts. On the western aspect of Mt Longonot the rim rises sharply and it is a bit of a rocky scramble to get more than it.

Beautiful sights are the reward for the slog – as you circumnavigate the crater you to start with see over Lake Naivasha and its encompassing flower farms to the west, then south and east toward Maasai Land and lastly north to the Aberdares. My mountaineering buddy was Agnes and she instructed me that in many years earlier, this was a place neighborhood Maasai men would appear to throw themselves into the crater if existence grew to become too challenging to deal with.

The track up the mountain is also the only way down. It’s extremely sandy, and I could not say which course is less complicated: two measures up resulted in just one and a 50 percent ways down as you sink in the sand even though one particular step down resulted in sliding down the equal of three ways and stressing about knee joints.

Maybe I’ve painted an unfairly grim image of this mountain, but make sure you realize that my sedentary life-style implies that mountain climbing is just not magnificent for me! My climbing companions cherished it and couldn’t wait to do it yet again.