Rwenzori Mountains — mountain
Nick06 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Rwenzori Mountains

  • Elevation5,109 m
  • 2 min read
  • 0.386° N 29.872° E

Interesting facts

  • The uplift that raised the range split an ancient lake, Obweruka, leaving behind Lakes Albert, Edward and George.
  • Samuel Baker glimpsed the range in 1864 and called it the Blue Mountains; Henry Morton Stanley recorded the name Ruwenzori in 1888.
  • Vittorio Sella's photographs from the 1906 expedition already show the glaciers in retreat; his plates are kept in Turin and Biella.
  • In 1906 the Rwenzori glaciers made up about half of the total glacier area in Africa.
  • A drone survey in 2025 found that the Stanley Plateau glacier had lost about 29.5% of its surface area between 2020 and 2024.
  • Polish climbers made the first traverse of all six massifs in 1975, taking from 27 January to 13 February.
  • On one of its peaks grows a heather about six metres tall, draped in moss.
  • Its giant alpine plants resemble desert species: nightly frost blocks their water supply, so they evolved thick insulation against freezing.
  • Mount Speke and Mount Baker, also in the range, are the fourth- and fifth-highest peaks in Africa.
  • About 70 percent of Uganda's Rwenzori Mountains National Park lies above 2,500 metres.

Why it is worth it

On the equator, between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a block of ancient crystalline rock has been lifted to more than five kilometres above the sea. The Rwenzori are not volcanoes and not the product of colliding plates: they are a slab of the continent raised roughly three million years ago, and they count as the highest mountains of that kind anywhere on Earth. The range runs about 120 km by 65 km and breaks into six separate massifs divided by deep gorges; its summit, Margherita Peak on Mount Stanley, reaches 5,109 m, the third-highest point in Africa.

The walk up is a climb through stacked worlds. The vegetation changes in distinct, overlapping bands: evergreen forest to about 2,800 m, then bamboo, then a belt of heather, then the alpine zone, where giant groundsels and giant lobelias rise like figures from another planet. Above 4,400 m comes the nival zone of rock, snow and the last equatorial glaciers. The forests below shelter forest elephants, chimpanzees and the Rwenzori turaco, along with species endemic to the range.

The range carries an old geographical myth. Ptolemy wrote of snowy "Mountains of the Moon" feeding the Nile, and European explorers came to identify them with the Rwenzori, whose streams do in fact flow into the Nile system. In 1906 an expedition led by the Duke of the Abruzzi climbed the principal summits and named many of them; one massif, Mount Luigi di Savoia, carries his own name. The ice he saw is now largely gone: 43 named glaciers covering some 7.5 km² in 1906 had shrunk to about 1.5 km² on three mountains by 2005, and the retreat continues. The Ugandan side is protected as Rwenzori Mountains National Park, created in 1991 and a World Heritage Site since 1994; the Congolese slopes lie within Virunga National Park.

Getting there

The usual approach is from Uganda. The town of Kasese, about 32 km from the mountains, is the gateway, and the national park boundary lies roughly 25 km from it; Kasese itself is about 437 km west of Kampala. Kasese Airport (KSE) has scheduled domestic flights from Entebbe International Airport (EBB). The classic route, the Central Circuit, starts at the village of Nyakalengija near Kasese and follows the Mubuku valley up towards Mount Stanley; a full circuit with a summit attempt on Margherita Peak usually takes about seven days and is arranged through local trekking operators. On the Congolese side the nearest town is Beni, about 46 km away.

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From the encyclopaedia

The Rwenzori are a range of mountains in eastern equatorial Africa, located on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The highest peak of the Ruwenzori reaches 5,109 metres (16,762 ft), and the range's upper regions are permanently snow-capped and glaciated. Rivers fed by mountain streams form one of the sources of the Nile. Because of this, European explorers linked the Ruwenzori with the legendary Mountains of the Moon, claimed by the Greek scholar Ptolemy as the source of the Nile. Virunga National Park in eastern DR Congo and Rwenzori Mountains National Park in southwestern Uganda are located within the range.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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