Mount Meru

History

The first European to record a sighting of Mt. Meru was a German explorer, Karl von der Decken, who reached this area in 1862. The mountain was later seen by other explorers, including Gustav Fischer in 1882 and Joseph Thomson the following year. In 1887 the Austro-Hungarian Count Samuel Teleki and members of his team penetrated the dense forest on the lower slopes and reached a point where the trees thinned out enough for them to see Kilimanjaro, which they planned to climb later in their expedition.

The first ascent to the summit of Meru is credited to either Carl Uhling in 1901 or Fritz Jaeger in 1904.

By the end of the 1880s the area around Meru had become part of German East Africa. In 1907 the land of the mountain was cleared and farmed by a settler family and part of the land was set aside as a reserve for indigenous wildlife. This area remained the property of the family until 1960, when Ngurdoto Crater National Park, which included the farm, was established.

In 1967, the boundaries were extended to include Mt. Meru, and the park was renamed Arusha National Park. The summit of Meru was named Socialist Peak, although this title was never commonly used.

Geography

Mt. Meru has a circular base some 20km across at 2000m, where it rises steeply above the foothills and plains. The mountain is an almost perfect cone with an internal crater, or caldera, surrounded by a steep wall of cliffs. At about 2500m the wall has been broken away, so the top half of the mountain is shaped like a giant horseshoe, with the opening on the east side of the cone and the highest point directly opposite. The cliffs of the inner wall below the summit are over 1500m high, which makes them among the tallest in Africa. Inside the crater more recent volcanic eruptions have created a subsidiary peak called the Ash Cone.

 

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