Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest point in Africa, 5,895 metres, and it rises alone from the plains of northern Tanzania, which makes it the tallest free-standing mountain on Earth: no range around it, just a snow-capped dome floating above warm grassland dotted with acacias. It can be walked to the top without ropes or climbing skill, and that is why tens of thousands of people try each year. The climb takes about a week and passes through five climates stacked on one slope. It begins in rainforest with monkeys in the trees, climbs into heath and giant groundsels taller than a person, crosses a high desert of bare volcanic ground, and ends in an arctic zone of ice and scree. High camp sits above 4,600 metres with no town light for many kilometres, and on clear dry-season nights the Milky Way stands almost overhead. The final push leaves in darkness, so that you reach the crater rim at dawn, ice underfoot, with the plains of Africa far below the cloud, and walk on to Uhuru Peak, the highest point.
The snow that made the mountain famous is nearly gone. About 85 percent of the summit ice measured in 1912 had disappeared by 2011, and what remains is thinning; the glaciers at the top are now separate blocks rather than a cap. The snow that does come follows the rains, not the sun: the cover laid down by the short rains of November and December sits under the clear air of January and February, the one window when you can both see it and climb comfortably. On the fertile southern and eastern slopes live the Chagga, whose farms are watered by the mountain's forests and whose villages are where most climbs begin. The summit was first reached in 1889 by two Europeans led up the ice by a young Chagga man, Yohani Kinyala Lauwo, and the name Kilimanjaro has no agreed meaning; the mountain has outlasted every explanation of it.