Kilimanjaro's Reusch Crater
and the Man It Was Named After

Kilimanjaro is a volcano, and every volcano has a crater. But Kilimanjaro is not done showing off: inside its main crater sits a second one, and inside that a third. The innermost of all is a place most climbers never lay eyes on. It is called the Reusch Crater, and it carries the name of one of the most extraordinary men ever to walk these slopes.

Of the roughly 50,000 people who set out to climb Kilimanjaro each year, only about 300 descend into the crater at all, and only a handful ever peer into the Reusch Crater itself. It is a genuinely hidden gem on the roof of Africa, a geological time capsule sitting far below the crowds on the summit rim.

In this article we will walk you through what the Reusch Crater actually is, who Gustav Otto Richard Reusch was, why the inner crater of Kilimanjaro carries his name, and, most usefully, how you can visit it for yourself.

Kilimanjaro's Craters: A Volcano in Three Acts

Kilimanjaro is the largest volcano born at the edge of the East African Rift, where one tectonic plate is slowly tearing itself away from another. That process carved deep valleys and pushed up mountains and volcanoes along the rift's rim. The valleys filled with water to form the Great African Lakes, Lake Victoria, the largest continent, Lake Tanganyika, the deepest, and many smaller siblings.

The mountain itself is really three volcanic cones fused into one massif. Reading from west to east they are Shira, Kibo, and Mawenzi. Shira collapsed long ago, leaving a plateau. Mawenzi is a jagged, weathered spire. And Kibo, the tallest of the three, still wears the great crater that tops out at Uhuru Peak, the highest point in Africa. It is inside Kibo that our story unfolds.

The Kibo Crater: Kilimanjaro's Main Stage

Standing on the rim of Kibo's crater is one of the great moments of any Kilimanjaro expedition. You have seen the photographs, the sweeping panorama, the glacier clinging to the far wall, the sense of standing on top of Africa. What the photos rarely show is what lies below the rim, because most people only ever look at the view from it.

The Kibo Crater is an elongated circle about 2.5 kilometers (1.55 miles) across. Uhuru Peak, the summit everyone is chasing, is simply the highest point on the crater wall. The walls themselves range from 120 to 350 meters (394 to 1,148 feet) high. Temperatures inside swing between roughly -15 °C and +5 °C (5 °F to 41 °F), and on a clear night they often plunge below -10 °C (14 °F).

Here is the part that surprises most people: the main crater of Kibo is really three concentric craters stacked inside one another. The outer bowl is Kibo Crater. Inside it rises an Inner Cone. And at the very heart of that cone sits the innermost chamber, the Reusch Crater.

The Reusch Crater: The Hidden Gem

Inside the great Kibo caldera rises the Inner Cone, and tucked within it is the Reusch Crater. Around it cling several glaciers, the most famous being the Furtwängler Glacier, prized for its closeness to Uhuru Peak. Climbers with energy left after the summit often trek over to see it before descending.

The Reusch Crater measures about 820 meters (0.51 miles) in diameter , a third of the size of Kibo's bowl, and its walls stay under 100 meters (328 feet). It is, in a word, modest. So why does it feel so special? Because it is invisible from Uhuru Peak. The point where virtually every climber arrives offers no view of it at all. You have to go looking.

Approach its center and you will find one more puzzle: a pit roughly 200 meters (656 feet) deep, called the Ash Pit. You might guess the name refers to volcanic ash, and it does evoke exactly that, but in fact it honors the scientist J.H. Ash, who studied the inner crater in 1943. A coincidental name, and a wonderfully confusing one.

The inner crater received the name Reusch in 1954. So who was this man, and how did he earn such an honor?

Who Was Richard Reusch?

Gustav Otto Richard Reusch was a German born in the Russian Empire in 1891. He spent decades living at the foot of Kilimanjaro, heading up to the mountain again and again. By the time the British governor of Tanganyika, Edward Twining, wanted to honor him in 1954, Reusch had racked up 25 successful ascents to the summit, and those were only the ones that counted. With his partial climbs, he made at least 40 attempts in total; some sources put the figure as high as 65 expeditions. The locals gave him a fitting nickname: "Son of Kibo."

But Reusch is remembered for more than just climbing. If you have ever heard the famous story of a leopard found frozen in the snow high on Kilimanjaro, the one Ernest Hemingway wrote about in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", you have Reusch to thank. He discovered the animal's carcass on his very first expedition in 1926.

Ask older residents of the Kilimanjaro region about him and you will hear a different story again. To them, Reusch was the missionary and preacher of the Lutheran mission, a compassionate man who was always ready to help, for whom the mountain was more hobby than career. He was also a trained orientalist who specialized in Islam, and an ethnographer who studied the Maasai. A man of many lives, indeed.

A Volga German in the Russian Empire

Richard was born into a family of Germans living in the Lutheran settlement of Baratayevka (formerly the Bettinger colony) on the Volga River. These German colonies were founded in the second half of the 18th century, when Empress Catherine II, herself born a German princess, invited German families to settle the empire's vacant Volga lands and granted them privileges for doing so.

His family later moved to the North Caucasus, where Richard attended a cadet corps and a military school. It was in Vladikavkaz that his lifelong passions took root. Constant contact with Muslim neighbors sparked an interest in Islam, and he learned Arabic. At military school he took up mountaineering, and with the Caucasus and Mount Elbrus on his doorstep, the mountains became a second home.

His father, Gustav Reusch, was a parish school teacher who wanted his son educated in theology. His grandfather, meanwhile, felt a military career was too dangerous for the family's eldest heir and favored a calmer life in the church. Between the two of them, they won. Richard left the army and crossed the empire to Yuryev, where he graduated from the Lutheran seminary.

Then came 1917, and two revolutions that ended the monarchy and dragged Russia into civil war. As a White Army officer, Reusch fought the Bolsheviks, but when the city of Tartu fell, he fled first to Germany and then Denmark. His brother Emil stayed behind and kept working as a Lutheran pastor in the new Soviet state.

Richard Reusch, Missionary in East Africa

Richard chose a post with the Evangelical Lutheran Mission in Leipzig. That organization had grown so successful since the late 19th century that it could afford stations in distant lands, including India and Africa, and it was busily laying the groundwork for the missionary work that unfolded through the 1920s and 30s.

Reusch learned English and Swahili, trained as a nurse, and in 1923 was sent to East Africa. His first posting was Arusha in Tanganyika, the British-run colonial territory that would later become part of mainland Tanzania. For the next few years he worked between Arusha and Nkoaranga.

In 1926 he made his first successful ascent of Kilimanjaro, reaching the summit then known as Kaiser Wilhelm Peak, today's Uhuru. It made him just the 15th person ever to climb the mountain. And on that very expedition, he stumbled across the frozen leopard that would make him famous around the world.

The Leopard, the Ice, and Hemingway

Members of an earlier expedition had reported seeing the leopard, but it is Reusch who is forever linked with its discovery. The animal lay at around 5,640 meters (18,504 feet), deep in the then-permanent snow. It caused a sensation, and raised an obvious question: what on earth was a leopard doing up there?

A century of observation later, we know leopards rarely venture above 5,200 meters (17,060 feet), so the leopard on Kilimanjaro was already pushing far beyond its range. Hemingway, who published "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" a decade later, wondered aloud: "No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude." But Reusch had a theory.

Reusch and his companions moved the leopard's body to a rock, leaving the antelope on the Ratzel Glacier. On his next ascent Reusch found the leopard still there, and other climbing parties saw it too, the spot even earned the name Leopard Point. Then, on a later climb, Reusch discovered that both bodies had simply vanished. The mountain had taken them back.

The First Tour Leader on Kilimanjaro

In 1927, Reusch was posted to Marangu to head a seminary school for local students. Marangu sits near Moshi and was where the first expeditions to the summit began, its route, the Marangu or "Coca-Cola" Route, became the first official path up the mountain and still has the best infrastructure of all the routes today.

While living in Marangu, Reusch married an American nurse named Elveda Bonander, a volunteer at the mission. They had three children. Her name too lives on the mountain: between Stella Point and Uhuru Peak, at 5,890 meters (19,320 feet), there is a spot called Elveda Point, not far from the Reusch Crater itself.

A milestone followed in 1929 with the founding of the Mountain Club of East Africa, organized by Reusch and Clement Gillman, a British geographer and chief engineer of the Tanganyika Railways. Gillman left his own mark on the map: at 5,681 meters (18,638 feet) stands a sign reading Gilman's Point , complete with a missing "l" that moves from sign to sign every time they are replaced. It marks where the Marangu Route reaches the Kibo Crater, the highest point the engineer himself reached.

Why can Reusch fairly be called the first tour leader on Kilimanjaro? Because he climbed the mountain at least 40 times, and mostly as a guide, leading groups and solo travelers who wanted to see snow on the equator. He genuinely loved the mountain, and he loved inspiring other people to climb it. As a side hustle, he collected butterflies and sold the collections to fund his life in Tanganyika.

Later Years, Books, and a Farewell to Africa

The Mountain Club of East Africa later grew into the Kilimanjaro Mountain Club, founded in 1959 and still going today. It managed the Marangu huts until 1973, when the newly established Kilimanjaro National Park took them over. The Club still meets monthly in Moshi, and its archive of historical materials about Kilimanjaro , built up since Reusch's day, is a treasure trove.

Reusch's own story took new turns. When Hitler came to power in Germany in the 1930s, the Leipzig Mission stopped funding its overseas stations, so Reusch's guiding income became his lifeline. In 1937 he moved to Singida, south of Lake Eyasi, to train missionaries and teachers. He joined the American Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod and helped unite East Africa's scattered Lutheran missions into one organization.

He defended the rights of the Maasai when the British tried to move them off their traditional lands, and established the first Lutheran mission in Machame, the village near Moshi where our own Masatu Tours expedition base sits, on the grounds of the Aishi Machame Hotel. Locals remember him as a preacher people walked for miles to hear, a man who never refused to help, physically strong enough to haul heavy stones by himself. When he finally left Africa, the Maasai are said to have cried and begged him to stay.

Reusch was also a writer. He translated the Bible into Swahili, published "Islam in East Africa" (1931) and "I Lived Among Muslims" (1953), and later his most famous work, "History of East Africa." His manuscripts on the Maasai remain in the archives of Gustavus Adolphus College and, by all accounts, still interest ethnologists today.

He left Africa for good in 1954, the very year the crater was named for him, and settled in Minnesota, where he pastored for another ten years and taught at Gustavus Adolphus College. His last expedition came at 79, when he climbed Mount Sinai. He died in the USA at 84; his wife Elveda followed two years later. Their shared tombstone bears the silhouette of the African continent, the place that connected their lives and was their home for 31 years.

How to Visit the Reusch Crater

You can reach the Reusch Crater during an expedition that plans a descent into the crater. If you want to join us, simply let us know in advance that the crater is on your list, we'll adjust your expedition program and brief your guides accordingly.

Don't want to camp inside the crater? There's still a way. On any route that ends at Uhuru Peak, you can, after reaching the summit, descend to the Furtwängler Glacier and walk across to the Reusch Crater. Your return path takes you back up to Stella Point , no need to return to Uhuru. The detour adds about two hours to the day's climb, but it is the closest most climbers ever come to this hidden feature.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Kilimanjaro gives most visitors a story they will tell for the rest of their lives. But the Reusch Crater offers something rarer: a story very few people can tell at all. It is a place of hidden depths, literally and figuratively, where a dormant volcano still breathes warm sulfur through a pit named for a scientist, beneath ice that never quite gives in.

And behind it all stands Richard Reusch: a refugee turned missionary, a mountain guide before guiding was a profession, a man who climbed Africa's roof 25 times and still stopped to help the sick and the dying in the villages below. The crater carries his name; the people of Moshi carry his memory.

If you want to stand where only a few hundred people have stood before, and where a missionary once left his mark on history, tell us before you book. We'll make the Reusch Crater part of your Kilimanjaro story.