In forward of Audrey Salkeld’s book “Kilimanjaro: To the roof of Africa” film maker and climber David Breashears tells of the time he heard stories of elephant bones high on Kilimanjaro… and eventually he found a skeleton 15,000 feet up the mountain. While he doesn’t expand more on this mysterious skeleton, legends of elephants high on the mountain are not uncommon.
It’s a known fact that once an elephant senses its time has come, it separates from its group to die. Some stories tell that old elephants make a final climb past the snowline of Africa’s tallest mountain to a precarious cliff at the edge of the hidden crater. There, thousands of old elephants have jumped from the crater rim to join their ancestors in the boneyard below. As told by the Chagga people, these elephants that call Kilimanjaro home, do so to foil the poachers who hounded them in life, stowing their ivory in a remote, nearly unreachable, final resting place.
Whether true or not, these stories invoke a sense of mystery and only add to the magic of the world’s highest freestanding mountain.
