Carl Uhlig

The first European to record a sighting of Meru was the German explorer, Karl von der Decken, who reached this area in 1862. The mountain was later seen and described by other explorers, including Gustav Fischer in 1882, and Joseph Thompson the following year. In 1887, the Austro-Hungarian Count Samuel Teleki and members of his team penetrated the dense forest on the lower slopes and reached a point where the trees thinned out enough for them to see Kilimanjaro, which they planned to climb later in their expedition. The first ascent to the summit of Meru is credited to either Carl Uhlig in 1901 or Fritz Jaeger in 1904.

Jaeger merely mentions that he and Uhlig 'found' the Engaruka ruins during their expedition in 1904; they camped on the Engaruka stream on the 29th September, and again on 5th October, but neither Uhlig's otherwise fairly detailed map to the scale of 1 in 150,000 nor Jaeger's later map of 1911, indicate these ruins. Jaeger merely says that they are 'alleged' to be of Tatogo origin.

C. Uhlig and F. Muller climbed the volcano on 4 August 1910 and observed that "the northern crater had only a horse-shoe-shaped southern rim immediately below the summit, and lacked a crater rim to the north, west and east. The crater was more like a platform on which there was a central cone from which gas was being emitted".

Lava flows and pinnacles formed on this platform between 1904 - 1910 and again between 1913 - 1915.