Seven Climbs by Charles Sherwood

Author:Charles Sherwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Published: 2020-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

Mount Kenya: the Gate of the Mists.

AFRICA

TRAVERSE OF NELION AND BATIAN, MOUNT KENYA (KENYA)

East Africa is home to the continent’s most impressive mountains, two of which dominate in particular. Mount Kilimanjaro boasts the highest summit at 5,895 metres but, being a comparatively featureless volcano, is a trekking peak and lacks real climbing interest. Mount Kenya, by contrast, is a collection of different peaks – more properly a range or massif – offering a wealth of climbing routes and claiming the continent’s second- and third-highest summits. Between these twin summits lays a fabled col, the Gate of the Mists, a region of mixed rock and ice, separating the meteorological northern and southern hemispheres. The natural objective is a full traverse of the massif taking in both summits and col. This, however, is infrequently done, because it requires both full-on summer and full-on winter climbing with all the associated equipment, plus the need, in most cases, for an open bivouac. Popular or not, that was my objective.

Kenya has a special place in my family story. I have enjoyed not just one but two honeymoons there. My natural father having died while I was very young, my mother remarried when I reached eighteen. I gave her away, and my brother was best man. We all went together on the honeymoon to Kenya. This might seem an odd decision for the bridegroom, who had until this point been a bachelor and had no children. But then my stepfather, Jim, was and is a rather special man. My brother and I changed our surnames to his by deed poll a couple of years into the new marriage. The idea of formal adoption, though, never came up, and would anyway have been impossible under English law since we were no longer minors. It was only much later we discovered that Jim, harking as he did from Kentucky, could legally adopt us under US law. And so it came to pass that my stepfather formally became my father at the age of eighty-four, and adopted his two sons of fifty-seven and fifty-eight a full forty years after that honeymoon in Kenya.

My honeymoon with my wife, Rosemary, I refer to as my ‘second honeymoon in Kenya’, much to her annoyance. This was my first experience of Mount Kenya itself. Over five days we trekked in from the north, via the Teleki Valley; climbed the lowest of the three major peaks, Point Lenana (4,985 metres), which requires some puff but no climbing expertise; and exited to the south-west via Mackinder’s Camp. Thus it was that on 3 August 1984 I stood with my new wife on top of my first African summit. It was a wonderful moment. But even then I had a feeling that one day I must return … with a rope.

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