Mount Cameroon

Where is Mount Cameroon?

Mount Cameroon is part of the Cameroon Volcanic Line.

You will find it in: Cameroon.

Summit: 4.217° N, 9.172° E

The story behind it

The mountain stands on the Gulf of Guinea, and walking up it you pass through thick rainforest, then open grassland, then bare black cinders. It belongs to the Cameroon Volcanic Line, a chain of volcanoes running about 1 600 kilometres inland from the ocean. Roughly half a million people live on its fertile lower slopes, and because the volcano is active, scientists watch it closely and lava-flow maps are kept for towns like Limbe. Every January or February hundreds of runners race about 38 kilometres from the sports ground in Buea to the summit and back, in the Guinness-sponsored Race of Hope. Sarah Etonge from Buea won the women's race so often that people call her the Queen of the Mountain. Sources disagree about the numbers: the height is usually given as 4 040 metres, while the Smithsonian volcano catalogue says 4 095 metres, and the most recent eruption is listed as 2012 by Wikipedia but as 2000 by the Smithsonian. Even the race has two starting dates in print, 1973 and 1995.

Find it on the globe

Mount Cameroon is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.