Bale Mountains National Park

The first thing you notice up here is the air. It is thin, cold, and clean, and every breath feels a little shorter than it should. Underfoot, the ground is spongy with tussock grass and low silver shrubs. Somewhere close, a small rodent whistles and dives into a burrow. The light is wide and white, and the horizon is almost flat. It is hard to believe you are standing on a mountain range in tropical Africa.

Welcome to Bale Mountains National Park, in the Oromia Region of southeastern Ethiopia. The park was established in the early 1970s to protect this unusual high country. In 2023, UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List as a natural site. That recognition came for a simple reason. Few places on Earth hold so many plants and animals that live nowhere else, packed into one massif.

The heart of the park is the Sanetti Plateau. It is often described as the largest continuous area of Afroalpine habitat on the continent. Afroalpine means the high, treeless zone above the forests on African mountains — a landscape shaped by frost at night and strong sun by day. Much of the plateau sits around four thousand metres above sea level. Ice once covered parts of it, and you can still see the smoothed rock and small lakes that the glaciers left behind.

Rising from the plateau is Tullu Dimtu, the second highest peak in Ethiopia. Its name is usually translated from the Oromo language as the red mountain. The summit is not a sharp spike. It is a rounded, rocky dome, and on a clear day the views run for many kilometres. Here is the first surprise. A gravel road crosses the plateau close to this peak, and it is one of the highest roads in Africa that vehicles can use all year.

Now, look closely at those grassy mounds and open meadows. This is the home of the Ethiopian wolf. It is the rarest member of the dog family in Africa, and Bale holds the largest population in the world. The wolf has a rust-red coat, a white throat, and long slender legs. It looks a little like a fox. Many visitors expect to see it in a pack chasing large prey. In fact, it usually hunts alone, in daylight, stalking slowly across the grass.

The wolf's main food is the giant mole-rat, another animal found only in these mountains. That whistling you might hear is often a rodent warning its neighbours. A mole-rat rarely leaves its burrow completely. It reaches out, grabs plants, and pulls them back underground. The wolf waits beside the holes, very still, and then pounces. Watching one of these hunts is a quiet, patient experience. It can take many minutes of waiting for a few seconds of action.

The plants here look as strange as the animals. Tall columns of giant lobelia rise from the moorland like green and brown poles. Some grow taller than a person. Around them you will see clumps of everlasting flowers, with papery silver and yellow petals that do not wilt easily. Lower down, there are thick stands of giant heather, draped with pale grey lichen. These plants have adapted to a daily cycle that one scientist famously described as summer every day and winter every night.

On the northern side of the park, near the headquarters at Dinsho, the landscape changes. Here, open grasslands and juniper woodland support herds of mountain nyala. This large antelope lives only in the Ethiopian highlands. The males carry long, spiralled horns and have a grey-brown coat with faint white stripes. You may also see Menelik's bushbuck, a dark, shy antelope, and the Bale monkey, which depends on bamboo forest. Many of these animals are easier to spot in the early morning.

Travel south across the plateau, and the road drops steeply through the Harenna escarpment. Within a short drive, the bare moorland gives way to dense, damp forest. The Harenna Forest is one of the largest remaining natural forests in Ethiopia. Mist hangs between the trees, and the air smells of wet earth and leaves. Here is the second surprise. Wild coffee grows naturally in the understorey. Ethiopia is the original home of the coffee plant, and in places like this it still grows wild.

These mountains matter far beyond their borders. Several major rivers begin on the Bale massif, including rivers that feed the Wabe Shebelle and the Genale. The water flows down into the lowlands of southeastern Ethiopia and continues across borders into Somalia and Kenya. Millions of people depend on that water for drinking, farming, and livestock. So the bogs and lakes around you are not only scenery. They work like a giant sponge that stores rain and releases it slowly.

People have lived in these highlands for a very long time. Archaeologists working at a rock shelter in the Bale Mountains found evidence that people lived at high altitude here tens of thousands of years ago. It is some of the oldest known evidence of humans living at such heights anywhere. Today, Oromo pastoralist communities graze cattle, horses, and sheep in and around the park. Their round houses and stone walls are part of the landscape you see.

That human presence brings challenges. Grazing, farming, and settlement put pressure on the grasslands and forest. Diseases carried by domestic dogs, such as rabies, have caused serious losses among the wolves. Conservation teams have worked for years with local communities, including vaccination programmes for dogs and wolves. The balance between people and wildlife is still being negotiated. When you visit, you are part of that story, because tourism helps show the value of keeping this place intact.

Take a moment now to stand still. Feel the wind moving across the plateau, and listen. You might hear the call of a raptor overhead, or the soft whistle from a burrow nearby. Scan the grass slowly for a flash of red fur. As you leave, notice how the plants change with every few hundred metres of descent. Each band of vegetation is its own world, and you have just crossed several of them in a single day.