Traveling in Uganda and the Congo

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Outside Magazine January 2005

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The Hard Way
Making It Real (Cont.)

I DON'T REMEMBER when I first heard of the Mountains of the Moon. Perhaps it was as far back as elementary school, when we learned that the Nile is the longest river in the world—4,160 miles—and that Ptolemy, second-century Greek polymath, named its source the Lunae Montis, or Mountains of the Moon, the mythic snowcapped peaks that rose from the jungles of central Africa. The source remained unknown until 1858, when British explorer John Hanning Speke discovered Lake Victoria and declared it the river's origin. But it wasn't until 1888 that Henry Morton Stanley became the first European to see the highest source of the ancient river: the snow mantling the equatorial peaks of the Rwenzori (the modern name for the Mountains of the Moon), on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was pointed out to him by an African boy who thought the peaks were covered with salt.

My next serendipitous encounter must have been in H. W. Tilman's Snow on the Equator (1937), for when you are still too young to strike out on your own, the next best thing is to read of men who did. In the early 1930s, the taciturn British explorer and his mountaineering partner Eric Shipton ventured into the Rwenzori. His descriptions—of "the nightmare landscape," with its constant cold drizzle, tree-size flowers, leg-swallowing mud, jungle "made grotesque by waving beards of lichen hanging from every branch," and elusive peaks hidden in roiling mist—gripped me like lust.

ADVENTURE SPORTS germinate only in stable conditions. The mountain club had NO GEAR AND FEW MEMBERS with experience.

Then, in 1987, descending off Mount Kenya, I had an offhand conversation with a Kiwi who had just been to the fabled Rwenzori: "Times in there we was walkin' on roots suspended ten feet 'bove the ground like they was the backs of snakes," he said. "You can't imagine it."

But I could.

The trigger came in 2003, on the London Tube: I stumbled on a story in The Guardian about University College London geographer Richard Taylor, who, during a recent scientific expedition into Rwenzori Mountains National Park, discovered that, due to global warming, the glaciers were rapidly melting.

I had to go now, before my dreamland disappeared.

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