Surviving the Mountain of Death

Inside Nigeria's forgotten interior

As I crouched down to business over the pit latrine, surrounded by a curious family of baboons a few feet away, I knew trekking in Gashaka Gumti was going to be an experience. Fortunately, given my somewhat exposed situation, I didn’t need to heed that one vital piece of advice when in the presence of primates: don’t ever smile (the sign of aggression). One baboon jumped down several branches until he was just a few feet away. He sat, staring at me, as I attempted to aim and fire. The others looked on with the casual indifference of animals without language. The philosophical question arose: should one feel self-conscious when defecating in front of a bunch of monkeys?

Gashaka Gumti National Park is the largest and most remote park in Nigeria, West Africa. At over 6,000 square kilometres, it is a feast of wildlife: civets, lions, hogs, buffalo, black-and-white colobus monkeys, as well as some 500 species of birds, including a startlingly blue kingfisher. Most significantly, the park has a population of around 2,000 endangered chimpanzees. University College London has a primate project at an abandoned village called Kwano deep inside the forest which it runs jointly with the Nigerian Conservation Foundation.

Together with eight adventurers, I had decided to climb Gangirwal (a.k.a Chappal Wadi, a.k.a the Mountain of Death), Nigeria’s tallest mountain. It lies deep inside the park, on the border with Cameroon and although not a huge mountain at only 2,400 metres, its name and remoteness held a certain allure. I had to climb it. Professor Volker Sommer, leader of the primate project, had helped with the arrangements, organising porters from nearby Gashaka village, as well as two park rangers and a tracker to act as guides. The walking-camping segment of our trip was to last six and a half days.

We set off at 5.30 am from Abuja. The trip to Serti, the nearest town to the park, took nearly 12 hours. Serti is a hot, dry place at this time of the year, so no generator means no air conditioning and sleep for foreigners. The following day, two pick-ups arrived....

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