The Most Beautiful Mountain Range in Africa? …Yet Not a Trace of a Tourist
Photos by Douglas Miller (@dougshoots)
Devil in the Mountains
The local chief tells me that the last time someone attempted to summit Sankan Biwa was 60 years ago, possibly more. Two people went up, only one came down.
The deceased saw a devil and chased it off the edge of the cliff, plunging to his death. His comrade left a glass bottle on the mountain’s summit, an offering to appease the spirits. So the story goes.
This is the only information I can find on Sankan Biwa (Google was no help), the 1800m twin-peaks that are the tallest in the Tingi Hills Mountain range, and amongst the tallest in West Africa. The villagers tell me that the name translates as ‘Big Mountain’ in the local dialect. It all sounds very promising.
‘Daddy Rhymes’
Our starting point is a small village on the border between the Kono and the Krankor tribes. Getting here takes about two hours from Koidu — Sierra Leone’s diamond capital — using motorbikes to navigate the rutted and frequently flooded dirt roads, and requires approval of four separate chiefs.
Having filled up on groundnut soup and freshly slaughtered chicken, we assemble a crack team of guides who, donned in flip-flops and Premier League football shirts, introduce themselves under rapping names like David ‘One Sun’ and ‘Daddy Rhymes’. We are ready.
The Climb
The first day is a brutal six-hour climb through thick and humid jungle, following a loosely defined track goes in a beeline to the top of Tingi Hill (derived from ‘Thinking Hill’, so-called because it is a great place to go and reconsider your life choices). One guide feints along the way.
The view from the top is worth the sweat, as up till now Tingi Hill had blocked the view of the main mountain range, standing like a guardsman in front of the ring of imposing mountains. Sankan Biwa is the jewel atop the granite crown, separated from us by forest valley that burns in the spring, leaving the trees a striking red, black and gold.
We camp in the shadow of a huge overhanging rock face, that, if I was a professional climber and not afraid of death, would be quite enticing. We all agree that Alex Honnold should come here.
The Plateau
The second day we descend back down through the valley, past waterfalls and over single log bridges 20ft above roaring rapids.
To reach Camp 2 we climb up a calf-burningly steep rock face, onto the range’s main plateau.
Stonegoat
We are joined along the way by ‘Eh-Boi’, a hunter we stumble across in the jungle. Whilst he rarely talks, he is a talented marksman and a decent chef.
At night we sit around the campfire, dining on large rodents and small deer, and listen to Daddy Rhymes rap the national anthem.
Summit
The morning of the summit day is treacherously windy and bitterly cold. Doug points a route straight through the middle of the rockface we need to climb. We all agree: ‘Let’s make sure we don’t take that route.’ We climb up the middle of the rockface anyway.
We scramble up the sheer rocks, hoisting ourselves up steep shelves of granite covered in thorny grass, keeping our bodies close to the rock to shelter from the wind.
After about an hour of exposed climbing, there is no more mountain to climb.
The summit is marked by a bizarre concrete pillar, encased in cast iron and standing like a stubby raised middle finger atop the mountain. We stuff a few jelly beans into the remains of the ancient glass bottle, which lies next to the obnoxiously weighty summit marker.
The panoramic view is stunning. Countless more imposing — and unclimbed — mountains pierce through the fog, forming chains of peaks all the way to Guinea, not a human settlement in sight.
Whilst it seems like everywhere worth seeing these days has been made into a tourist destination, it is an amazing feeling to see such natural beauty without a single trace of a tourist ever having visited. When everything is posted endlessly on Instagram, the adventure and anticipation is lost: climbing Sankan Biwa, without any idea what lay ahead of each step, was a truly unique experience.
