Kitum Cave

Kitum is a cave that elephants dug. They walk into the dark, break sodium-rich rock off the walls with their tusks and eat it, and they have been doing it for long enough that the cave is thought to be substantially their work. Kenya Wildlife Service lists the salt-mining elephants of Kitum first among the attractions of Mount Elgon National Park, ahead of the mountain’s second-highest peak in Kenya, and that ordering is correct.

What Kitum Cave Is

The cave extends roughly 200 metres into the side of Mount Elgon, on the Kenyan flank of the massif near the Ugandan border. It is one of five named caves in the park. Kenya Wildlife Service’s own brochure names them as Kitum, Making’eny, Chepnyalil, Ngwarisha and Kiptoro, and describes Making’eny as about 1.5 kilometres from Kitum with a waterfall falling across its mouth. Kitum is the one visitors are normally shown.

It is not a show cave. There is no lighting, no walkway and no interpretation panel. What there is, is a large dark chamber with a furrowed and scored rock face, bat colonies overhead, animal tracks in the floor and a ranger with a torch. Broader context on Kenyan caves as a whole sits on the caving in Kenya page.

The Elephants That Mine It

Mount Elgon is wet, and wet volcanic soils leach out minerals, so the vegetation elephants eat on this mountain is short of sodium. The cave walls are not. Various geological processes have concentrated sodium, calcium and magnesium salts in the rock, and the animals go underground to get at them.

The technique is mechanical. An elephant works a tusk into a seam, levers off a fragment, then chews and swallows it. The marks left behind are long parallel furrows, and for a long time they were assumed to be the work of people rather than animals. A single elephant has been reported to take away as much as twenty kilograms of rock in a night. Over centuries this is understood to have enlarged the cave, which is the part that makes Kitum genuinely unusual rather than merely interesting: the animals are not visiting a cave, they are making one.

Most of the digging happens at night, which is also why visitors rarely witness it. Buffalo, bushbuck and hyena follow the elephants in for the salt that is left loose on the floor. Kenya Wildlife Service’s brochure calls the elephants the troglodyte tuskers, which is a better name than most tourism copy manages.

Lava Tube or Something Else

There is a straightforward conflict here and it is worth stating rather than smoothing over. Kenya Wildlife Service describes the park’s caves collectively as caves formed from ancient lava tubes, and repeats that description on the park page and in the brochure. Speleological work on Kitum specifically disagrees: it classifies the cave as a non-solutional cave developed in pyroclastic rock, not a drained lava tube, with a formation history tied to the layering of soft and hard volcanic deposits and water moving through them. Water erosion and the animals themselves are both credited with a part in the result.

The two descriptions are not compatible, and popular accounts copy whichever one they met first. The caving guide sets out the same conflict. For a visitor it makes no practical difference at the cave mouth, but it is a good illustration of how a sight can be confidently described two different ways by sources that both sound authoritative.

The Marburg History

Kitum is associated with Kenya’s only recorded Marburg virus disease events, and the subject is treated properly on the caving in Kenya page rather than summarised into a line here. The short version is that the World Health Organization’s outbreak record lists Kenya twice, in 1980 with two cases and one death and in 1987 with one case and one death, giving three cases and two deaths across more than four decades of regular visits. WHO identifies the Egyptian rousette fruit bat as the natural host and states that initial human infection arises from prolonged exposure to mines or caves inhabited by colonies of those bats.

Read the caving page before deciding, because it carries the actual figures, what WHO says about the mechanism, the scale of the risk and the precautions that follow from it. Take ranger advice on the day. Anyone who would rather not weigh the question at all has Making’eny and the mountain’s moorland walking on the same trip.

Visiting the Cave

Kitum is reached from Chorlim Gate, the main gate and the site of park headquarters, on the signposted murram road from Kitale. A visit is a short walk and an hour or so underground rather than an expedition, and it is normally combined with Making’eny and with time in the forest belt.

• A ranger escort is the norm and is worth having, because this is a national park holding elephant and buffalo in thick forest.
• A headtorch with spare batteries and a backup light. There is no lighting inside.
• Closed boots with grip. The floor is uneven, wet in places and covered in guano.
• Clothes that can be ruined, and a willingness to stay out of the deep roosting chambers.
• Park gates open at six in the morning and close at six in the evening.

One physical hazard inside the cave is specific and easy to overlook: there is a deep crevasse into which young elephants have fallen and died. Rockfall is the other. A roof fall in the early 1980s blocked part of the elephants’ usual path, which is a reminder that the ceiling of a cave being levered apart by large animals is not a stable structure.

Conservation fees for Mount Elgon National Park are charged per person per day and are set out on the Mount Elgon guide. Figures quoted elsewhere for a separate cave admission do not match the published park schedule and should not be relied on.

Where Kitum Fits in a Trip

Kitale is the gateway town and the practical base. Most people reach Kitum as part of a wider western Kenya loop rather than as a destination in itself, pairing it with the Saiwa Swamp boardwalks, with Kakamega Forest to the south, or with a trek to Koitoboss. The cave and Making’eny together make an easy half day, which leaves the rest of the time for the mountain.

Questions About Kitum Cave