Safari to Mount Kenya

the technical summit reduces the appeal

Set 140 km (90 miles) north of Nairobi, Mount Kenya is the second highest mountain in Africa, only 700m (2270′) less than Kilimanjaro at 5200m (17060′).

But where Kilimanjaro offers a non-technical trek to the summit, only serious climbers can attempt the top of this mountain. Trekkers have to make do with a rather lower subsidiary summit.

Back in 1980 the number of climbers and trekkers on the two mountains was approximately equal. Since then the shift towards Kilimanjaro has been almost absolute. Mount Kenya now receives less than 2% of the traffic of its larger cousin.

This despite the fact that Mount Kenya arguably offers a greater range of scenery and contains an excellent network of relatively little-used trekking trails.

The lack of demand for treks on Mount Kenya means that there is now a real dearth of decent operators, most having long since packed up and headed south of the border. We continued to offer regular treks on Mount Kenya up to 2005, but there’s only so long that you can continue to flog a dead horse, we simply couldn’t fill the slots.

These days we only offer specialist tailor-made treks on Mount Kenya and this is very rarely. But there are still some good people on the ground to outfit a decent quality trek. It’s certainly worth asking if you are really keen.

Rather bizarrely the northern slopes of Mount Kenya are sometimes visited (often by helicopter) in order to access various fishing lakes which were established here and populated with non-indigenous trout during the Colonial Era. We understand that it was at one of the simple cabins up here that Prince Harry proposed to Meghan Markle.