Appalachia, Winter/Spring 2007
Ol Donyo Orok is 8,359 feet tall and rises from the endless thorn-tree savanna on the Kenya-Tanzania border. The mountain is about 50 miles from Mount Kilimanjaro, which is 10,000 feet higher. I first saw Orok from a nongovernmental organization’s Land Rover as we plunged over rutted dirt roads to visit a remote borehole. We turned a bend and the west face of the mountain flitted past the windshield. I was sitting on metal bench in the windowless rear of the utilitarian vehicle, braced with my arms and legs to minimize my body’s airborne bounces off the steel edges that surrounded me. The vision shocked me, and I doubted it until the road brought the mountain within steady view from the driver’s open window: a long series of staggered peaks, knit together by rocky shoulders and rising from a single sheer face plunging into the flat savanna. I asked its name.
“Orok,” the borehole engineer told me, a Maasai word, “Ol Donyo Orok.” Black Mountain.
A year later, the mountain still only an insistent silhouette among the hills on my horizon, I learned more about Orok from the library of a Catholic Missionary. J. J. Thomsen, in his landmark trek through Maasailand, the territory of one of the most feared tribes in East Africa, climbed a shoulder of Orok in 1883 but failed to reach the summit. The first ascent of the mountain was accomplished by G. E. Smith on the 1902–1904 expedition that established the border between British Kenya and German Tanzania. The 1969 edition of the Mountain Club of Kenya’s Mountains of Kenya noted, “During the 1967 Mountain Club meet on the mountain, large herds of elephant were encountered on the way up, and buffalo and rhino were met near the summit.”
I was a Peace Corps volunteer living in a high school in the town of Kajiado, teaching about HIV. For many months, loneliness defined my life. In the evenings I took long walks on the footpaths and the dirt roads near my house. I looked down at the narrow bars of shadow that leapt at sunset from each pebble in the dust. I lifted my head to be overwhelmed by the long emptiness that soared between the gold savanna and the curving roof of the sky. Delicate masses of luminous clouds filled the void, and ranges of hills rose humbly toward them. My desperation throbbed in the sunlight that struck the blossoming edges of the clouds; in the curved shadows that scythed across the cleft rocks of the Enkorika Hills, their splintered details aching in the crystal air. It was palpable in the rare and blessed vision of Kilimanjaro’s purple silhouette, its snow that seemed of a piece with the sky or with the delicate craters of the waxing moon, and in Orok, a shadow lurking beyond the Olemolepo Hills. These inaccessible visions drove the loneliness deeper even as they raised me above it. Every evening I walked out to them.
A year passed. I created work that I believed in. People I had learned to love released me from the wheel of loneliness. My desperate walks dwindled away. I had hiked to and climbed nearly everything I could see from the hill behind my house. The land had lost its tormenting, unapproachable splendor. My Peace Corps service would end in a few months. And Orok was still only a silhouette on the horizon.
On a visit to Nairobi, in the only mountain gear shop in the country, I found a Kenya Mountain Club guide with brief route descriptions for Orok. The $10 price of the book was one-fifth of my monthly Peace Corps living allowance, so I scribbled down the directions on a crumpled piece of notepaper. There were two routes listed, and I chose the shortest: steep, direct—up southern slope—one day.
On October 14, 2005, my friend Chris Austin and I were standing in the dust at a spot where the road that begins in Cairo and ends in Capetown, dangerously cratered and narrow, runs through Kajiado and crosses the railroad tracks of the spur line to the Magadi Soda Plant. We beckoned for a “lifty” from each car that passed, hoping to avoid the discomfort of a two-hour ride down to Namanga in a crowded public van. A white Land Rover finally responded to our upraised palms. A young missionary couple living in Tanzania drove us to the Namanga River Lodge, the starting point of the route from the Mountain Club guide. It was clean and comfortable with beautifully tended grounds, so we knew it would be too expensive. When we told the concierge that $28 a night was too much for our budget, he directed us to the decrepit Namanga Safari Lodge next door. After checking in, we reconnoitered our route for the next day:
Head west from back of lodge’s grounds, on a ridge past water tanks. S-W thru manyattas—onto disused road, rock with distinct vertical face visible on ridge to west, continue on road until rock is due North (?)—see obvious V-shaped valley dropping down from “summit…”
- John Teschner
The full text of this story may be found in the Winter/Spring 2007 issue of Appalachia.
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