Magazine
Skiing on Mt Kenya? Yes... once upon a time
The attraction of the mountain has not diminished with the disappearing snow cap as these climbers will attest. Photo/FILE
Posted Monday, February 8 2010 at 00:00
The London Illustrated News covered the story with pictures of barefoot porters plodding through the snow covered only in blankets, obviously shivering by the glacier.
Questions were asked in the British parliament as to why the Africans were forced to walk barefoot on Mt Kenya’s freezing snow.
“It was not normal for the porters to be barefoot above the snowline,” says Tony. “What happened was that the team were caught in a sudden snowstorm. Mathura was an expert hiker on the mountain and there had not been a snowstorm on the mountain for years.”
Fortunately the porters including the wazungu suffered only mountain sickness and no frost bite.
Vanishing snow
The 1936 annual skiing competition on Mt Kenya was the only one that ever happened, partly due to the lack of participants and partly financial constraints.
But even if it had taken off, climate change would have put an end to the annual competition by now.
The snow and ice on the volcanic peaks of Mt Kenya and Mt Kilimanjaro (the world’s tallest free standing mountain and Africa’s tallest at 19,340 feet) are melting away so fast that scientists estimate that in the next two to three decades they will have completely disappeared.
Twenty years ago, there were 18 glaciers on Mt Kenya. Today seven of them have completely disappeared.
Lewis Glacier, where the 1936 skiing championship took place, as Tyndall, Gregory and Cesar, have shrunk some 60-92 per cent.
According to research funded by the British Department for International Development, global warming has also caused a seven fold increase in malaria around the Mt Kenya area due to a two degree centigrade increase in average temperatures around the mountain in the past 20 years.
Average temperatures reached 17 degrees centigrade in 1989 and today it are 19 degrees centigrade.
The local population of four million people has little or no immunity to malaria.
The meltdown on the massifs of both Mt Kenya and Mt Kilimanjaro is of huge concern as both are also vital water towers in the semi-arid areas they straddle.
As the temperatures around the world rise from the effects of climate change, mostly blamed on the increase in carbon in the atmosphere (a major problem in the developed world) and the depleting of natural forest covers (a developing nations’ dilemma), the ice-fields cannot be replenished as fast as they melt.
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