Mt Wuteve, Liberia Highpoint

Mt Wuteve (Wologizi), Liberia Highpoint

Jan 18, 2026

Eric, Serge, Moses, Amadu, Othello, local villagers

Jan 16 Get documents at Liberian embassy, drive to Liberia border
Jan 17 drive to Alabama Camp
Jan 18 climb Wuteve
Jan 19 drive to Monrovia

Prior to the early 2000s it was generally believed that Mt Nimba was the highest mountain in Liberia. This is a peak in the northeast corner of the country near the border with Guinea and Ivory Coast.

However, after satellite-based elevation measurements from the SRTM mission from 2002 were published and analyzed, it was discovered that Mt Wuteve was in fact taller. Mt Wuteve, also known in nearby villages as Wologizi, is in the northwest portion of the country and is about 50m taller than Nimba based on SRTM data. This difference is enough to trust that Wuteve is in fact the country highpoint. I still wanted to measure it, though, to find out its elevation as accurately as possible.

Serge and I had just finished climbing Loma Mansa, the Sierra Leone highpoint, with our guide Moses (experiencesierraleone.blogspot.com) and driver Amadu (ajmaruffcarrental.blogspot.com).

We planned to drive into Liberia overland to save money on flights. According to locals, the Jendema crossing is the only one we could drive across, so that meant returning from Loma Mansa back to the coast.

We needed special documents for the vehicle to cross, so on Jan 16 we went to the Liberian embassy in freetown. It was little complicated but we eventually got the documents, though before the final signature the embassy person said we needed a licensed Liberian tourist guide to meet us and the border and accompany us for the entire trip. And the embassy person needed to talk to the guide on the phone to confirm.

I hadn’t heard of this requirement before, but I guess there’s not a whole lot of beta online about climbing the Liberia Highpoint. Moses made some calls with contacts in Liberia and we arranged for Othello from the ministry of information and tourism to join us at the border. He said he had previously climbed Wuteve twice with other tourists, so he knew how to make it happen. That was perfect.

We left town by 1pm and made it to the Jendema crossing at 605pm, just after it closed for the night. No amount of negotiations worked to convince them to stay open a few more minutes, so we found a guest house to spend the night.

Jan 17 we got to the border at 8am when it opened, and we completed all the paperwork by 9am. Othello took care of all the documents on the Liberia side and we didn’t have to pay any bribes, which was surprising.

We made progress to Monrovia by noon, then headed north. The roads were in excellent shape all the way to Gbarnga and farther to Bariwen. They then turned to dirt and got progressively rougher, and I was happy we had a 4×4 with high clearance.

By 8pm we reached Alabama Camp (also called Lisko). We found the chief and agreed to start hiking in the morning at 6am with a few villagers accompanying us.

I slept in the truck while Serge used his hammock and the other guys stayed in one of the guest rooms in the village.

Jan 18

Nobody met us at 6am, so we went looking around and found the chief by 7am. He said we needed to have a meeting with more people in the village.

We met in a gazebo and more people trickled around until there were about 20 villagers and the chief. We explained what we wanted to do and Othello showed them all our documents showing we had all the proper permissions from all the relevant authorities. Othello had gone through this all twice before on previous trips so knew what to do.

The chief seemed satisfied. However, one guy, yellow shirt guy, insisted on inspecting our documents even more closely. He read them out loud word for word. Then, he started making up bogus reasons why they were not valid. It was pretty clear he just wanted to show everyone he was important, and he also wanted to extract more money from us.

He insisted Othello needed to call a superior in Monrovia and get verbal permission in addition to the written permission we already had. For some reason the chief went along with yellow shirt guy. So Othello tried making calls while all the villagers dispersed.

After an hour he came back and said he got the correct person on the phone and we indeed had all the correct permissions as our documents showed. But now the yellow shirt guy said we needed to pay $600 to climb the mountain. Our friend who had climbed it last year only paid $100, and Othello confirmed that was the price the previous times. It was unclear why the chief was letting yellow shirt guy run the show.

We told yellow shirt guy we wouldn’t pay that much. After more negotiations we got the price down and finally started hiking by 9am. Three locals came with us with machetes.

We walked a mile up the road to a smaller settlement, then followed a trail behind one of the mud houses. The trail led to a creek, which was the only water source on the route. Beyond there the trail disappeared and we started bushwhacking.

Higher up the ridge the vegetation got very dense in a recent burn zone, and the machete guys spent a lot of effort backing out a tunnel through the growth.

We eventually reached the crest of the summit ridge at a small local maximum covered in 6ft tall ferns. We then turned south, went down to a col, then hiked up to the summit by 315pm.

The summit was also covered in 6ft ferns, and it took us a while to find the official summit marker we knew existed. Finally we found the concrete post, and cut away all the ferns from it. It was inscribed with Wuteve Liberia.

I mounted the Trimble DA2 on the post and started logging data while everyone took a nice rest. We had to cut the measurement a little shorter than my preferred one hour since we wanted to get down before dark. The three hour delay at the start wasn’t great, and the bushwhacking had been slow going.

By 4pm we started down, and made it to the creek by 7pm just at dark. Then we followed the trail back to the road and walked back to Alabama camp.

It was too late to drive out, so we spent another night in the village.

Jan 19 we drove out early. The roads were rough enough that one of the brake pads rattled off a wheel and we had to stop to get it fixed in a village. We made good time after that, and were only slowed down by one of the many checkpoints. Usually Othello would show his government ID and we’d just get waived through. But this one was not so easy.

It appeared the guy in charge had been drinking a bit of alcohol and decided our documents did not have all the correct stamps on them. He was looking for a bribe. Othello was having none of that, and a bit of an altercation followed.

We were there for 30 minutes going between different buildings showing all our documents before the guy finally relented. All our documents were of course in order, and we did not want to pay a bribe.

After that we drove through a big rubber tree plantation owned by Firestone, then found a guest house near the airport. There we parted ways with Amadu, Moses, and Othello and waited for our flight out.

I processed the elevation data with TrimbleRTX and got 1448.5m +/-0.1m EGM2008, ITRF2020 Epoch 2026.03. This is about 1.5m taller than previously thought based on SRTM data. That’s not too surprising, since SRTM data can have errors +/-16m or more.

© 2026, egilbert@alum.mit.edu. All rights reserved.