This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Enock Bwambale stopped at the lip of the dying glacier, its blunted nose arcing steeply down to scoured rocks, then shouted up to his fellow guide Uziah Kule that the ice was too sheer to descend on foot. Hacking his axe into the crusty surface, he twisted in an ice screw so I could rappel down the stubby face of the Stanley Glacier in Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Safely down, our small group took in the view of the heights of Mount Stanley: Margherita Peak — at over 16,700 feet (5,100 meters), the third highest point in Africa — and Alexandra Peak, between which hides the Stanley Glacier. I swung my camera around and tried to match a photo by Vittorio Sella, who had documented the summits of the surreal Mountains of the Moon during the first successful European summit attempt, in 1906. But an equivalent contempora... Read more
