Travel Guide Mount Elgon National Park

East of Mbale, on the border with Kenya, Mount Elgon is the eighth highest mountain on the African continent, reaching 4,321 meters at Wagagai Peak. Like most of the other mountains in the region, Mount Elgon is a volcano, now extinct, that resulted from tectonic activity that gradually shaped the Rift Valley over the past 30 million years. Elgon is thought to have erupted for the first time 24 million years ago and remained active for some 14 million years. Erosion has severely damaged this relief, which was once the highest in Africa, far surpassing the current 5,895 meters of Kilimanjaro. This mountain is particularly known for its caldera of 40 km2, which shelters hot springs and swamps, its waterfalls, its gorges, its rocky walls (such as that of Mudange) and its caves. Numerous rivers take their source on the slopes of the volcano, making it a real water tower feeding the agricultural piedmont. The first European to walk the slopes of Mount Elgon was the Scottish naturalist and explorer Joseph Thomson in 1883, while Frederick Jackson became the first Westerner to reach the caldera several years later. For the Bagisu, who live on the western side of the massif, Mount Elgon is the incarnation of their founding ancestor, Masaba, and they call the mountain by this name. The Ugandan part of Mount Elgon was declared a national park in the early 1990s, with a designated area of 1,121 km². The vegetation changes according to the altitude and the rainfall: one passes from the stage (1 500 to 2 500 meters) where the typical forest species of the tropical mountains dominate(prunus africana, teak...) to the Afro-alpine stage (above 3,500 meters), in which lobelia and ragwort stand out, passing through the open forest (2,500 to 3,000 meters), dotted with bamboo (on the western and southern slopes only), and the moor (3,000 to 3,500 meters). Mammals are rarely observed apart from monkeys (vervets, colobus, baboons...), although a few buffaloes and forest type elephants live, along with the leopard, in the park perimeter. Birds are numerous, since some 300 species have been recorded, some of which are endemic like the Jackson's francolin