Ethiopia's Simien Mountains is looming high above the volcanic outriders of the Great Rift Valley, 670 miles north of Addis Ababa, the range is nature junked-up on growth hormones: a 60 km long basalt escarpment staggered between altitudes of 3000 and 4500 meters. The area is populated by supersize plants, boisterous monkey armies 500-strong and supersize ravens with a penchant for cookie crumbs.

It's not a place that has always welcomed outsiders. From 1983 to '99, famine and regional warfare snuffed out its tourism potential. Today, however, with Ethiopia's economy expanding amid a semblance of political stability, the country is becoming a relatively safe and accessible destination. It's often the tawny grandeur of the Ethiopian highlands, cradling Lalibela's rock-hewn churches and towering above the fabled tombs of Aksum, that most impresses visitors. And it's here in the Simiens that this region can be seen at its biggest and most sensational. Inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1978, it is a place that has been extolled by UNESCO’s as "one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world."

The terrain was relatively easy on the knees—sometimes pancake-flat. Yet the surroundings were on a scale that was hard to comprehend: giant lobelias (plants that look like a Dr. Seuss invention, with their spiky fronds and 3 meters-high flower stems) covering oceans of grass, a waterfall plummeting for hundreds of feet before disintegrating into clouds of vapor, squadrons of huge raptors in the sky.

Gelada are known to live in the largest aggregations of any primate, and this group lived up to its billing.

The Simiens have unforgettable wildlife encounters set against the eye-popping backdrop of the escarpment rim. Some of the park's inhabitants are more ubiquitous than others, but the “Ethiopian wolf”

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