Saturday we headed out to Mt. Longonot, about an hour drive just pass Kijabe, (where RVA is located) located in the Great Rift Valley, with amazing views of Lake Naivasha off in the distance and incredible terrain of ash, and lava pebbles made it an interesting climb.
Interesting fact: Longonot is derived from the Masai word Oloonong'ot meaning mountains of many spurs or steep ridges. The park covers 52 km2 most of it being occupied by Mt. Longonot a young volcano rising to 2,776 meters above sea level, the base of the hike starts at 2150 meters. The last eruption was in 1863
The trail ahead of us looked do able, we were going to climb to the top of the ridge, hike around the edge of the crater and back down. The conditions were unforeseen! I unfortunately have been struggling with the dryness this past week and my asthma has flared up, I thought hiking would help me in the breathing process but I wasn't ready for windy dry dusty ash blowing in my face. This trail slowed me down.
So about 600 metres later I made it to the top of the ridge and it was well worth it! The view was spectacular from the top, if there wasn't the haze, you could see forever through the Rift Valley and the inside of the crater was a dense forest. But this point the ridge looked like it was easy to take on. So as we all took a needed rest at the top and refueled on fruit, we set off to take it on.
As we were hiking, there was three peaks, that gradually got larger and my first thought was, do we know what we are getting ourselves into? The peaks were very much able to do, but we had six year old children with us! So our group started to diminish, no we didn't leave people behind, but some of the kids opted out. I unfortunately didn't make it beyond the third and largest peak, my lungs were not going no further, the dust was unbearable for me.
But that was the best part of the day, taking in the view, checking out Lake Naivasha, Hell's Gate, and trying to pin point where RVA was on the hill side...even SMS'ed my brother, said...I am waving from Mt. Longonot!
Looking back at what was accomplished, was great, we came back with dirt in every exposed part of our body, my hair was grey with ashes, everyone had dirt smeared on their face, it was just filthy after we were done. This picture is looking down toward the gate entrance, you can vaguely see the trail etched in the green terrain.
We raced back down the trail to the picnic lunch that we had packed, dirty as we were, all the food went down as we were famished from a day of hiking! I ended up with a pretty good wind and sun burn, but it was all worth it in the end!
It was a great day, with great weather, with great people!
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