Principal photography took place over nineteen days, with ten days on Mount Kenya out of an intended twelve, getting up to about 15,000 feet, Shebib remarking that he had to train and get into shape before he could direct the film. One of the crew, Rick Ridgeway, wrote the introduction for a recent edition of No Picnic on Mount Kenya. Ridgeway, a mountaineer of international reputation who climbed K2, the world's second-highest peak, was responsible for the alpine scenes. One of the crew died on the first day on the mountain:Mount Kenya is 17,000 feet. It's easy to get up to 12,000 or 15,000 feet, but you have to do it in three or four days, you can't just do it all in one day. You get mountain sickness and die. The guy who died was a local, so he should have been more climatized, but he went up too quickly. Vincent got mountain sickness.