Loma Mansa (Bintumani), Sierra Leone Highpoint

Loma Mansa / Bintumani, Sierra Leone Highpoint

Jan 13-15, 2025

The highest peak in Sierra Leone has different names in different local languages, Loma Mansa and Bintumani, both meaning Chief Mountain. The closest village to the peak is Sinikoro, to the west, and they call it Bintumani.

Serge and I flew from Brazil to Sierra Leone to continue our country highpointing trip. It took five separate flight legs and a few days to get from Sao Gabriel to Freetown, and we arrived at 430am Jan 13.

Just outside security we exchanged money at bank offices that surprisingly were open. The atms at the airport were either broken or only gave maximum $35 at a time, so were not very practical for our purposes.

In West Africa it is generally cheaper and safer to hire a car with driver than to rent a car, and we went with Moses, who is from Sinikoro village at the base of Bintumani.

He picked us up in a land cruiser at 5am and we drove north. The roads were paved and smooth the first few hours, then got a little rougher.

We stopped in Kabala at 10am for breakfast, then continued on rough dirt 4×4 roads for three hours to Firawa village.

There we met the chief and paid a fee, and continued a short ways farther to Momoria village. Beyond there the road got much rougher and would be tough for the land cruiser. We continued on motorbikes with locals from the village.

We stopped again at Bandakarifaia village to pay another fee to the chief, then continued to Sinikora by 430pm. We paid a final fee to the chief of Sinikora, then parked the bikes for the day. We spent the night in the village, with Serge sleeping in a hammock and me on the ground (I was trying to go as light as possible and didn’t bring a tent or hammock, but those would have been nice).

We heard Bintumani has become a popular hike with tourists from Europe, and Moses had just led another trip a week earlier. Most groups take two days, but we decided to compress it into one day to save time on our trip.

Jan 14 we left the village at 3am with two local guides (guides are mandatory to enter the protected area around the peak.)

We reached camp 1 after two hours, then camp 2 by 7am. The last section to camp to is very steep and slipper. We stopped at camp 2 for a break to fill up water. In the distance some monkeys jumped around on boulders and barked like dogs.

Above camp two the terrain changes from jungle to open grassland. It appears locals have cut down the trees for cattle grazing. The grass was freshly burned and we saw another fire in the distance. I think this is to maintain the area as grass and not allow trees to grow.

We made fast progress and reached the summit by 9am. There is a huge cairn on the very top and the villagers said each time a person reaches the top theist add a new rock to the cairn.

Unfortunately this cairn made getting an accurate summit measurement more challenging. But I mounted the Trimble DA2 on the tallest rock outcrop next to the cairn, which should be pretty accurate.

We hung out for an hour admiring the view, then hiked back down at 10am. We made good time, taking a short break at camp 2 then making it back to Sinikoro by 3pm. The total mileage was about 16 miles.

I processed the data with Trimblertx and got an elevation 1942.4m +/-0.1m EGM2008 geoid. This is about 3m taller than the previously recognized elevation.

We spent the night again in Sinikoro, and watched the semifinals matches of the Africa Cup with the villagers at the communal TV room.

The next day we motorbiked and drove back to Freetown.

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