On Saturday, Barak and I ascented Mount Longonot (click on this link and select “satellite” view). It is a dormant, stratovolcano (a conical volcano that is made of many layers of hardened lava) that overlooks Lake Naivasha in the Rift Valley, northwest of Nairobi.

We woke up to rain, but decided to make the drive out anyway. I’m glad we did! It was cloudy the entire day, which made the weather perfect to hike in, although we were not offered great views of the crater or the surrounding Rift.

Here is our gps track (the yellow line), rendered in Google Earth:

From the base to the rim is an easy 60-minute ascent. There are a couple places that may be considered a class 2, and barely a class 3 scramble. The trail was full of secondary students from several schools in Nairobi. It’s good to see Kenyans out enjoying their environment, but when I’m on a mountain, I prefer not to have crowds of yelling children. Once we reached the rim, we decided to run the circumference, which took another two hours…and allowed us to escape the crowds. At one point we attempted to descend into the crater. However, it had been raining for the last three days, and the steep side of the crater lended itself well to landslides. So after 30 meters of descending and watching uncomfortable amounts of loose earth give way beneath our hands and feet, we thought better and continued on the rim instead. This picture is just inside the crater:

Photo courtesy of Barak.

On the north side of the main rim is another smaller crater that protrudes from its side. It is a beautiful view looking out over it:

Start of hike = 2,152 meters (just over 7,000 feet)
Highest point on rim of crater = 2,776 meters (9,108 feet), although I measured it at 2,772 meters (9,092 feet).
If you have Google Earth you can download the track of our hike here.

Photo courtesy of Barak.

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