Mount Baker or Kiyanja is a mountain in the
Rwenzori Mountains National Park in
Uganda
Uganda, officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered to the east by Kenya, to the north by South Sudan, to the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the south-west by Rwanda, and to the ...
, from the border with the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. With a height of , it is the fifth highest mountain in Africa. Together with
Mount Stanley and
Mount Speke, it forms a triangle enclosing the upper
Bujuku Valley. The nearest peak is Mount Stanley, which is to the west. The mountains lie within an area called "The Mountains of the Moon".
Like all peaks in the Ruwenzori Range, Mount Baker has multiple jagged peaks along a ridge. The highest is Edward Peak.
The ridge line of Mount Baker was first reached in January 1906 by the Austrian mountaineer
Rudolf Grauer accompanied by two British missionaries, H. E. Maddox and H. W. Tegart. In February of that year and again in April, the same rocky point was reached by an
English expedition, including
Alexander F. R. Wollaston, , and
Douglas Carruthers,.
[Climbing history before 1906]
at www.rwenzoriabruzzi.com. The highest point of Mount Baker was finally climbed in June by an expedition led by the
Duke of the Abruzzi, which climbed all peaks of the other five highest mountains of the Rwenzori, .
The
Bakonjo name for the mountain seems to have been (and currently is) "Kiyanja". On his June 1891 expedition into the Ruwenzori,
Franz Stuhlmann observed the peak and named it either "Semper" or "Ngemwimbi". Abruzzi renamed the mountain after
Samuel Baker, a 19th-century British explorer who in 1864 was the first European to sight and visit
Lake Albert, just northeast of the Ruwenzori Mountains, and who had reported to glimpse "great mountainous masses away in the distance, to the south of Lake Albert."
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References
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Rwenzori Mountains
Mountains of Uganda
Four-thousanders of Africa