Today’s installment really begins at 11pm on the previous day. That’s when we woke up to start getting ready for our summit attempt. Getting ready, in this case, basically entailed trying to wriggle into almost every bit of clothing I had brought with me: several stacked sets of thermal underwear, two pairs of heavy pants, waterproof pants, a few fleece jackets, my rain shell, a heavy balaclava / muffler, and two pairs of socks under my boots. I felt a bit like the Michelin man, but I was determined not to be cold. And midnight at 15,000 feet feels very cold indeed.
After a brief breakfast of tea and a couple of cookies, we set out in the dark (with headlamps, of course). Luke and I had our small day packs, more out of habit than anything since we were wearing all of our warm clothes and our rain gear. Our guide, Peter, and assistant guide, Sadai, went with just their heavy jackets and headgear.
We knew we had more than 4,000 vertical feet to climb, and that our goal was to be at the summit by sunrise, around 6:00am. While there were other people on the path doing the same thing we were, it wasn’t nearly as crowded as the trails we had been on the past few days — largely because only tourists and guides make the summit trek, so there were no porters jogging past us as we practiced pole pole and tried to pace ourselves for the long trip to the top.
After an hour or two, the air was noticeably thinner, and colder. The whole Kilimanjaro expedition had been marked by the phenomenon of being too cold at rest and too warm when actively hiking, and the summit trip was no exception. Every 30 minutes or so we’d stop for a quick break, only to find that we were really, really cold. But within minutes of starting to climb again, I would be simply roasting in my gear and would have to open my my shell to get some cool air.
The hike to the summit, like everything else on Kilimanjaro, seemed to go on forever. By 3 or 4 in the morning we had really settled into a trudging routine, making slow but steady progress. It was around this time that my heart/lung issue started to become irksome. Doctors tell me that about 30% of my blood regurgitates into my left atrium when my left ventricle goes to pump blood out to the body, so my body gets less blood and therefore less oxygen than it would like. Combined with altitude, that means deeper breaths, which I had been taking the entire time with no ill effect.
However, the air at 17,000+ feet is really, really cold. I found that I could breath through my balaclava / muffler and get warmer air, but it felt too restrictive, so every few breaths I would have to take a big gulp of pure mountain air… which was really, really cold, and which started to really irritate my throat and lungs before very long.
No matter, we were mostly there and I wasn’t about to stop at that point. So we kept trudging, until finally, around 5:10am, we got to what seemed like it must be the summit: the path leveled out and we found ourselves on relatively flat ground with a wonderful view. Unfortunately, this was not actually the summit, but Peter assured us that we had only another half hour or so to go, so we somewhat reluctantly continued our slow progress.
That last half hour or 40 minutes was really, really evil. The terrain was only moderately hilly, but it was at 19,000 feet and God only knows what temperature, so it was really very difficult. This last bit, too, seemed to go on forever. We’d crest a small rise only to see another small rise in the (near) distance.
[But finally, after it seemed like the hike would never end, we actually reached the summit proper at almost exactly 6:00am. I'd like to say that we high-fived and whooped for joy, but the truth is that we were exhausted and out of breath and had to settle for a mere "wow" moment as we sat down to rest for a moment. Breathing was difficult. Even sitting was difficult.
Like everyone else there, we had to take pictures with the sign marking the summit. It’s just something you have to do.
But after that we spent a few minutes walking around, looking at the glaciers and increasingly beautiful sunrise. The views were simply incredible, though I was too tired to fully appreciate them. The glaciers were spectacular, and the light from the sunrise at that altitude had a really unique and beautiful quality to it.
And then, after 8 days of hard work to get to the summit and about 15 minutes to enjoy it, we started down again. Luke commented that he felt better the moment we started walking down; for me, it took a little while longer to feel any kind of breath coming back.
Another thing they don’t tell you in advance about Kilimanjaro is that the trail down from the summit is different than the trail up. Whereas the trail up is a grueling path with lots of switchbacks and a relentless angle, the trail down is a grueling path with fewer switchbacks and an incredibly steep angle. Hikers know that downhill can be more difficult than uphill, and this proved that point. For the next three hours we half-ran, half-slid down this crazy trail as we descended 4,000 feet in probably 3-4 miles of trail. And, yes, this too seemed to go on forever.
By this time I had developed a nasty cough from scorching my lungs with deep breaths of freezing air and I was finding it really hard to proceed. But, unlike going up the mountain where you can conceivably give up in the face of difficulty, going down was a foregone conclusion. We got back to Barfu camp around 9:30am, nine and a half hours after starting our ascent to the summit. But the day wasn’t over: we still needed to descend to our next stop at Mweka camp, another 5,000 feet below Barfu.
We did stop at Barfu for a little more than an hour of sleep and some food, and then it was time to get on the trail again. The descent from Barfu to Mweka was another 3 hours of steep downhill, during which we transitioned from the barren wasteland of the summit area through light scrub to the downright tropical and lush setting of Mweka camp itself. Luke and I were pretty exhausted, which made the downhill that much more challenging. Oh, and it started to rain part way down, creating lots of slippery mud and rocks, which made our quick descent that much more interesting.
We finally reached Mweka in the early afternoon, covered in mud and dirt and thoroughly exhausted. Peter did say that we could continue all the way to Mweka gate and be back in Moshi by evening (showers! beds!), but Luke wisely demurred. That had been a long enough day, and one more night in horrendously dirty clothes and a tent wasn’t going to make any difference at all. We called it a day after a quick dinner and got to sleep early.
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