The Mountain of God

Since I just started this blog thing but there are a lot of cool things that I've done a while ago, I want to share some stuff that I might not have done so recently. This blog is about climbing the mountain called Oldonyo LeNgai.

Oldonyo LeNgai (Massai for Mountain of God) is an amazing mountain. First of all it is an active and very live volcano. Its lava is geologically unique to its kind. It has a mud-like look to it. That has something to do with what the lava is primarily made up of, but I can't fill you in on all those details. All I know is that this volcano is so completely unique and awesome. I've never seen anything like it. Furthermore, LeNgai is very steep. It is practically a forty-five degree angle climb almost the whole way. What amazed me is that this was a mountain you could fall off of!

We (me, my brother, two friends, Dave Doland, who was taking us on the trip) started our climb at around midnight. It is really nice to do a night-climb up this mountain because, if you are fast enough, you can make it to the top before the sun rises, and watch a spectacular sunrise. Also, you get to stop turn off you lights and gaze at the wonderful night sky. Now, the night sky in a place where there are no city lights for miles around is something totally different then seeing a couple tiny stars from the city. The black blanket of the heavens just abounds with trillions of stars, with different colors, sizes, and brightness. With the occasional shooting star, the still sky somehow seems to be teeming with life.

With a little while to go still, we realized that we probably weren't going to make it at the pace we were moving at. So we told the Dave that we would like to go ahead. So we did. Practically running up the last, steepest, hardest part was an adventure in itself. However we did make it to the top before sunrise.

Nothing could have prepared me for the crater on the top. I could have sworn I was on another planet. With crusty lava at your feet, smoke swirling around your ankles from vents in the ground, and pinnacles of lava from previous eruptions, this place didn't look of this world! The sunrise was another breathtaking spectacle to our already speechless selves. Jeremy, our friend who had been up there five times, said that he had never seen it so clear. In the early suns rays, we could see Kilimanjaro, Meru, and a number of other mountains. I remember that the suddenness of all these awesome sights was hard to take in. I felt over saturated. It was weird. With every step, we wanted to take another picture or video just because the next part the crater kept revealing itself to be better than the last. It was truly AWEsome. So we walked around the crater, seeing different views at every point until we got to the highest point, up on the rim. The view, by the way, is something else. First of all, the steepness of LeNgai gives you the feeling that you can actually look DOWN to your sides to see the land below. It's like you're standing on a needlepoint. Secondly, the land that you are looking at isn't quite of this world either. Lake Natron, teaming with flamingoes; the rift valley wall; the simply desolate, wild land; and more mountains all around creates a breathtaking atmosphere.

So after going around the crater and marveling at its features, we ate lunch we headed back down the mountain. This part was by far the hardest part of the whole trip. At an angle like that of LeNgai, walking down the mountain is not an option. You jog or you tumble. And with shoes that were already hurting my toes, I couldn't stand the pounding against the end of the shoes that the steep jog had created. In fact, me and my friend James periodically walked backwards to give our toes a break. It was insane! I was soooooo happy to find the car loaded with sodas at the bottom. So we piled up and headed back to camp to sleep for a couple of hours. In that area, you go to sleep on a bed but wake up floating in a pool of sweat. Its sooooo hot! Well that concludes the LenGai climb. We did, the next day, go to a cool waterfall. This waterfall is very amazing but I'll get into that in another blog.