Chiro Leba

Chiro Leba is one of those spots that makes you stop mid-sentence. We came in from the east on a route that had been fairly gentle by Simien standards, all grass and gelada troops in the distance, and then the pillars showed up on the horizon looking completely out of place — like someone had built a fortress out of dark stone and then let a few thousand years of erosion have their way with it. Our guide told us this is where a couple of the main trekking routes converge before pushing toward Ras Dashen, so the camp has this crossroads feeling, gear from different groups mixed together, guides catching up with each other like old colleagues.

We arrived with a few hours of daylight left, which I was grateful for because it meant we could actually walk up close to the basalt formations instead of just admiring them from camp. Up close they’re even more dramatic — vertical columns, some cracked and split, casting these long, sharp shadows across the grass as the sun dropped. I put my hand on one just to feel it, cold and rough, and tried to imagine the volcanic activity that stacked this stuff up millions of years ago. Ethiopia’s highlands are basically one enormous lava plateau carved down by rivers over time, and Chiro Leba is where that geology stops being an abstract fact in a guidebook and turns into something you can lean against.

That evening the temperature did its usual high-altitude nosedive, but the sunset made up for it. The pillars went from gray to orange to almost black in the space of maybe twenty minutes, silhouetted against a sky that kept changing color faster than I could get my camera settings right. Lia gave up trying to photograph it and just sat on a rock watching, which for her is a bigger compliment to a place than any picture.

If Buyit Ras is the introduction to the Simiens and Ambiko is the grind, Chiro Leba felt like the reward in between — proof that this range still has landscapes that don’t look like anything else you’ve walked through, even after days of dramatic scenery becoming almost normal.

When to go: Trek here in the dry season, October through March, and try to time your arrival for late afternoon so you catch the pillars at golden hour.