Bale Mountains

Bale Mountains National Park was established in 1970 in south-eastern Ethiopia, in the highlands east of the Rift, and protects some 2,150 km².

Its core is the Sanetti plateau, an expanse above four thousand metres that constitutes the largest Afroalpine moorland in Africa. It is a landscape of giant lobelias, everlastings, block fields and glacial lakes, with night frosts all year round and intense radiation during the day. The highest surfaced road on the continent runs across it. On the southern flank, the ground drops abruptly to the Harenna forest, a cloud forest of great extent and very little explored.

The isolation of these heights has produced exceptional endemism. The park holds most of the world population of the Ethiopian wolf, the most threatened canid on the planet, of which a few hundred individuals remain and which hunts endemic rodents on the moorlands, among them the giant mole-rat. It is also the main stronghold of the mountain nyala, an antelope endemic to Ethiopia, and is home to the Bale colobus and numerous birds found only in the Ethiopian highlands. The main threats are overgrazing, agricultural expansion and the rabies and distemper epidemics transmitted by domestic dogs, which have repeatedly decimated the wolf population.