Mount Kinabalu
Interesting facts
- Snow has been recorded on the summit area only three times in modern records: in 1975, 1993 and 2022.
- Hugh Low reached the summit plateau in 1851 with the Dusun guide Lemaing of Kiau, but judged the highest pinnacle accessible only to winged creatures.
- The true summit, Low's Peak, was first reached in 1888 by the zoologist John Whitehead, 37 years after Low's pioneering climb.
- The British botanist Lilian Gibbs became the first woman, and the first botanist, to stand on the summit, in February 1910.
- A 1997 satellite survey trimmed the mountain's official height by 6 m, from the long-published 4,101 m to 4,095 m.
- The mountain alone hosts more fern species than the whole of Africa, which has about 500.
- Rafflesia keithii, a parasitic plant whose single flower can reach 94 cm across, grows within the park.
- A 2015 Malaysian–Dutch DNA study found that many of the plants, animals and fungi unique to the summit are younger than the mountain itself.
- The name probably comes from Aki Nabalu, 'Grandfather Nabalu', the guardian spirit; the Liwan Dusun call the peak Gayo Ngaran, 'the Great Name'.
- In 2022 the International Union of Geological Sciences named it one of its first 100 geological heritage sites, as one of the youngest exposed granite intrusions on Earth.
Why it is worth it
Mount Kinabalu is the highest mountain of Borneo and of the Malay Archipelago, and a rare thing: a 4,095-m summit that fit, non-technical walkers can reach. Low's Peak, the top, is a knob of granite on a bare, glacier-scoured plateau; the whole massif is a granodiorite pluton only about ten million years old and still rising a few millimetres a year. On its north side Low's Gully drops about 1,800 m into cloud — a gorge whose first full descent was made only in 1998, after a 1994 army expedition trapped in it for weeks had to be rescued.
Kinabalu's real fame is biological. Around 5,000 to 6,000 plant species grow on the mountain, including more than 800 orchids and some 600 ferns, and it has the world's richest collection of Nepenthes pitcher plants, among them the endemic Nepenthes rajah, with the largest pitchers known. The climb is a lesson in altitude zones: lowland dipterocarp forest gives way to mossy cloud forest, then to stunted sub-alpine scrub and finally bare rock. Kinabalu Park, created in 1964, became Malaysia's first World Heritage Site in 2000. For the Kadazandusun the mountain is sacred, and after tourists stripped on the summit days before a deadly earthquake in June 2015, many saw the disaster as the spirits' answer.
The standard climb starts at Timpohon Gate at 1,866 m, 5.5 km from park headquarters. Most people walk up to Laban Rata at 3,270 m on the first day — three to six hours — sleep in the huts, and leave before dawn for the final 2 km over bare granite to watch sunrise from Low's Peak. Accredited guides are compulsory, and summit permits are only issued to climbers with a hut booking, which caps numbers at around 130 a day; booking early is essential. The Mesilau trail was closed after the 2015 earthquake.
Getting there
Ranau, the district town, is about 18 km from the summit. The headquarters of Kinabalu Park is 88 km by sealed road from Kota Kinabalu, whose Kota Kinabalu International Airport (BKI) is about 59 km from the summit in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mount Kinabalu is the highest mountain in Malaysia and Maritime Southeast Asia, located on the island of Borneo in Sabah. With a height of 4,095 metres (13,435 ft), it is the third-highest peak of an island on Earth, the 28th-highest peak in Southeast Asia, and 20th-most-prominent mountain in the world. The mountain is located in Ranau district, West Coast Division of Sabah, Malaysia. It is protected as Kinabalu Park, a World Heritage Site.
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