Director of Conservation for JGI-Tanzania Shadrack Kamenya, Lonsdorf and Lincoln Park Zoo Fullbright Fellow Emma Lantz in the mists overlooking Gombe.

Today our goal was to climb up to the eastern border of the park, which is the rift escarpment. The climb is basically straight up for two hours but has beautiful views of most of the park once you reach the peak.

While the views are great, the main reason for our climb was to help our parasitologist, Tom Gillespie, Ph.D., get a bird’s-eye view of the Gombe watershed. This would help him better understand how pathogens might move in the park via the waterways.

As is typical on these trips, things didn’t go as planned… It’s the rainy season, so it started to rain about one-third of the way up and didn’t stop for the next six hours. Once we got to the top, we were completely fogged and clouded in and couldn’t see anything!

We traveled along the top of the rift for a while but soon decided to come down since we were cold, wet and couldn’t see much. Problem was, we also couldn’t use the view from the top to navigate like we usually do, and we got pretty lost. We had to bushwhack through very thick mchaka (vine mats) on legs that were already pretty tired. However, we did eventually get down and are now just waiting for our feet to dry out. We aren’t holding our breath, though…it is the rainy season, after all.

Elizabeth Lonsdorf