Luke made a solid recovery from his debacle with Meru, so along with him and Tim I made for the summit of Kili as a team. However, it would be unfair to not mention our fantastic crew that at points carried the team up the mountain: our fantastic guide Joseph, assistant guide James, cook Mohammed, and 9 porters! It seems like a lot of crew, because it was... At each campsite we had two two-person tents, a three-man for Joseph and a few others, a dining tent... a whole tent for dining... and a big tent for the crew to sleep in. Not to mention the food needed to sustain us three and the whole crew for a week and the extra packs that the three of us gave to the porters to carry for us everyday. That's a lot of stuff. I mean these guys are absolutely amazing! They would literally carry all of this stuff up the mountain maybe 2-4000ft to the next camp with most of it on there heads... sometimes around 40lbs. They would practically run by us on the trail with all this stuff, and besides being incredibly disheartened by this constant occurrence, I was just downright impressed. Their presence was also incredibly useful for me because they set up all our tents before we got there and cooked us delicious meals. The moral of the story: I may be hiring some porters for my next backpacking adventures...
The initial plan when we started our climb was to take the Machame rout and go "pole pole" (slow), and take 7 days. The first few days were really nice starting bright and early at around 7 and making it into camp around 2-3:00pm. The terrain started off on the first day as incredibly dense rainforest, with some light showers on the way up. We made camp in some woods with a nice view of the summit the next morning with the usual shroud of clouds having dropped. Day two was a nice consistent climb, ascending along a rocky ridge past the trees and into some shrub covered volcanic landscape. It was very picturesque, but incredibly crowded with the porters and people climbing the same Machame rout, we would have to pull over to let the porters past and had to nimbly pass by the slower parties. Nonetheless, we had a good day making really good time and lots of altitude getting into camp around 3:00pm. This camp was situated on a big open dirt field so it was really easy to see the vast expanse of tents that covered a massive area. There were so many people on the trail with us and with most people having more porters than us I felt like I was in a seventeenth century military camp. At this camp we had lots of free time, so we hiked and saw the Shira caves next to the camp site where porters and guides used to sleep up untill 8 years ago! It was crazy, I can't imagine sleeping there for a night, especially with 40 other people cramped in there. Day three was yet another day of great hiking where we made it up to around 15,000ft to a site called the Lava Tower for lunch. Pretty much the whole day we had a great view of the Kilimanjaro summit, and at the Lava Tower (literally a tower of lava...) the summit seemed so close! Which I guess it wasn't, but at least we had a spectacular view. from the Lava tower we actually descended to a lower elevation to stay the night, heading over nice ridges down and around the Kili. On day four we decided to change the game a little bit and skip a campsite to do the treck in six days as opposed to7. We were all feeling healthy so it seemed like the right choice. The morning greeted us with a spectacular view of Kili and a daunting wall called the barranco wall, which as it sounds, is just a large cliff! It's the warm up to start the day snaking our way up the rocks to the top maybe a thousand feet up! It was probably my favorite part of the hiking because of the rock scrambles and amazing views, but it was slow going because there were many people and porters crowding up the tiny ridges trying to reach the top. After the wall, the rest of the day proved to be equally fun with more ascending and cool terrain. I have to say day four was my favorite day of hiking in terms of the challenge and the views. It was a very long day because we skipped a campsite, but we made it in good time around 3:00pm, which was good because it gave us time to rest before the climb to the summit that night. The barranco campsite was interesting because it was in a large boulder field so my tent was packed between boulders. It was also at 4600 meters which is very high, so I found when I was trying to sleep that night that I couldn't breath through my nose because I couldn't breath deeply enough with the oxygen levels. It was not optimal because I didn't actually sleep very well. Fortunately though, up to this point I had taken all my altitude medicine and hadn't felt any adverse affects because of the altitude. But at the end of day 4 at 11:30pm we started our big ascent in the final push to the summit of Kili.
Summiting was a massive challenge for me, and it pushed me both mentally and physically. We woke up at 11:30 and were on the trail by about 12:30am of day 5. We used headlamps and together it was me, Joseph, Tim, and Geoffrey our porter. Together we started the 4000ft climb along a steep ridge up to the rim of the crater. The first two hours went smoothly without many problems making good time and passing lots of groups. Many groups actually started either at 10 or 11 and were a ways up the mountain already. After two hours, however, I started to feel some ill effects from the altitude and started becoming cold and exhausted. Eventually I was struggling so much that Joseph actually took my pack off my back. Towards the top of the ridge we started getting into glacier territory, and it was absolutely frigid and there was lots of wind and whipping snow. At this point I was stopping frequently due to complete exhaustion and was struggling to find the energy and will to keep going. I did nonetheless and made the final push up until the rim of the crater at almost 5800 meters. I had made it most of the way in terms of altitude and only needed that last final push to make it about a mile to the actual summit! But by this point complete exhaustion had taken over and the altitude sickness wasn't helping either. But actually the worst part was the cutting cold. It was still only 4:30 so it was completely dark with heavy winds and a lot of ice snow in the air. On the final push to the summit every time I sat down to rest I had to get up and keep going because I didn't want to freeze. Eventually though, with the help of Joseph, I made it to the summit! I was so happy! I was so tired and cold, but I was just overwhelming excited to make it to the top! I was the first person to reach the summit that day at around 5:15am. I sat down for a second next to the completely snow and ice covered sign and took some pictures, but then began to realize that the cold was actually really effecting me and I was fearing some form of mild hypothermia! I really wasn't prepared enough and was shaking uncontrollably and decided that I needed to go down immediately or I was gonna freeze. So I told Joseph and Geoffrey and I ran down the mountain as fast as we could to get out of the cold and warm ourselves up. I made it down all the way to the camp at around 6:45 or 7:00, running the whole way. Although on the way down I did manage to see an absolutely beautiful sunrise! I was upset I didn't see it from the summit, but it still was spectacular from my vantage point on the ridge! I climbed into my sleeping bag and crashed sleeping until noon. I made a solid recovery though and was able to get up and move down the mountain to the next camp site, where we then stayed the night. The next morning we got up bright and early at six and made the final descent to the gate parting ways with the crew and going back to Arusha to rest and sleep. It was quite the adventure and I will cherish it forever!
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