Fit For Mt Kenya

Mt Kenya is the highest mountain in Kenya and the second highest mountain in Africa. The snowcapped peaks of Nelion (5188m, 17,021ft) and Batian (5199m, 17057ft) tower over the central highlands of Kenya, offering the highest technical climbing routes in Africa. Climbing to one of the true summits of Mt Kenya is a unique experience and is said to be some of the best technical alpine climbing in the world. It is definitely one of the greatest mountain challenges Africa has to offer.

Our Fit for Mt Kenya program is designed for those who dream of summiting an alpine peak but have little or no previous technical climbing experience. You may be a keen hiker looking for the next challenge or an indoor climber looking to get into the mountains. This program will guide you through the skills and fitness training needed to successfully summit Kenya’s highest peaks.

African Ascents is a professional mountaineering and adventure tourism operator based out of Nanyuki. Our expert guides have a wealth of experience on Mt Kenya and qualifications that make us the best at what we do: training and guiding guests on technical terrain.

Whats Involved?

Get Fit

If you don’t climb or hike very often our gym based program will help you improve your general fitness and strength before your climb.

Learn to Rock Climb

This is the most important part of this program.

We get started with 8 indoor climbing sessions at the BlueSky Climbing wall in Nairobi or, if you live in Nanyuki, The Mt Kenya Climbing Gym.

We then aim to get you outdoors climbing on rock for at total of about 4 days. This is usually a combination of Hells Gate National Park and the Northern Part of the Aberdares at a spot called the “dragons teeth”. We start off with a day of short single pitch climbing and then gradually work up to some longer multi-pitch climbs.

*If you are interested in our Fit For Mt Kenya program but live overseas please get in touch via email as we are able to offer the learn to climb program in certain countries through our guiding partners.

Climb Mt Kenya

There are a number of different trekking routes up Mt Kenya. For this challenge we’ve chosen the most spectacular of them all - the Chogoria route. This route takes about 4 days to get up to the base camp where you will start the climb to Nelion and/or Batian. Depending on the route we take, the climb up to the summit takes between 6-8 hours of rock climbing followed by 4-6 hours of rappelling to get off the mountain. This makes for a long but spectacular day out on the mountain.