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Friday, July 7, 2023; Day 8

Last night’s sleep was the best to date, even with high winds and noisy groups traipsing by after 1am. Exhaustion is the best sleep aid, I suppose. :)

The tent is again just under 40F, but I’m cozy in my wool hat. I slept from 7p-1a, 1a-3a, and 3a-5:30a. The wind overnight was so extreme that I worried at times that the tent might rip apart but it seems to have held up. I’m very happy to get my coffee at 6a.

There’s another pretty sunrise beside Mawenzi Peak:

At breakfast, my oxygen saturation is back up to 88%. While billed on our itinerary as a “celebratory breakfast”, it was essentially the same as all of the others, except now we had no worries about summit day.

After breakfast, we break camp and retrace our steps downward, down the rock wall and past Baranfu camp. Going down the rock wall was much easier than going up.

After passing by Barafu, we make a turn and have a long and easy descent over the Alpine desert. We arrive at the “High Camp” and take a short break there before continuing through the Moorland.

The trail was rockier and more uneven, with large portions a set of rough concrete stairs. We were descending through a cloud at this point, and it made some of the sections a bit treacherous. There was a very light drizzle at points, but not enough for me to bother pulling out my rain shell or pack cover.

The hike passes quickly, the first half as I listened to Sherri and Matt talk about management and global threats. Matt was slated to take on a big new role at an air base in Europe, and Sherri asked him how he would manage that. Matt laid it out super simply, and I wrote it down because I loved how he framed it, and I knew I was about to take over a new team when I got back to work.

It’s straightforward and the same thing a pilot does every time they call into the tower. You start by answering three questions: Who am I? Where are we? and Where are we going?”

Matt’s Wisdom

For the second half of the day’s hike, I was on the lookout for cool photos to take, from mist-coated flowers to foggy tree tunnels, all while trying not to slip on wet rocks.

After two more hours, we reached camp at noon, a bit damp but in good spirits.

Now we are hanging out in the tent, waiting for the lunch “washy washy.” I’m an odd sight — thick hiking socks, hiking shorts (I took off my soaked pants), and no shirt, exposing my set of custom dog tags made a decade ago reading Esse Sequitur Operare. From the voices outside, it sounds like the slower half of our party have arrived. It’s a comparatively balmy 55F with little wind. I’m not too stinky, but my fingernails are black and I shudder to think about how nasty my hair must be– I’ve been wearing a hat every time I leave the tent for the last 8 days. I peek using my small camp mirror and because I cut my hair so short just before the trip, it’s not too bad actually.

The Doc and others get to camp a bit later than the early group, and at lunch we talk about how she’d helped out with the guy we’d passed on the trail who was being carted down on a one-wheeled stretcher. (Pulmonary edema, if I remember right.) They’d planned to fly him out, but the weather wasn’t cooperating, so he taking the much rougher way down with a team of porters pushing/carrying the stretcher. We all could imagine how lucky he must’ve felt to randomly come across an American doctor on the side of the mountain.

After lunch, I photograph each page of my journal thus far, just in case anything happens to it.

At 5pm, we have the tipping ceremony, which features singing, dancing, including a waiter dressed as a lion, and some heartfelt “thank you” speeches from both the trekkers and Respicius. The porters collected $77.60 apiece, a solid figure (based on $56 suggested), so the mood was upbeat despite a dreary late-afternoon mist.

Dinner was butternut squash stew, rosemary beef, and a Nutella banana crepe. My Oxygen saturation is spiked to 97% now that we’re down to 10100 feet.

We’ll wake tomorrow at 5am to hit the trail at 6am just before dawn. We should reach the exit gate by 9am. I’m excited at the prospect of getting a shower and a beer.

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Thursday, July 6, 2023; Day 7

It’s been noisy throughout the night as teams of hikers from Barafu pass through after midnight. They seem to make no effort toward keeping quiet, and there’s singing and shouts as they pass.

Our 3am wakeup call arrives quickly, and most of us are up at 2:45am, eager to get started. Looking toward the mountain, we can see the lights of those groups who passed by hours ago as they reach the crater’s rim at Stella Point.

Fortunately, it’s not too cold, hovering at 40F in our tent.

Since we’ll be returning back to this camp tonight, we don’t need to pack up our tents. I spend my time savings re-finalizing my ascent outfit. I end up picking my thickest Smart Wool socks, removing the boot insoles I’d tried out yesterday (because they won’t fit with the socks). I put on my convertible hiking pants with my rain/shell pants over the top. On top, I wear my midweight wool base layer under my Craft/Decker Half Marathon tech shirt — its 5th or 6th wearing this trip — remarkably, it still smells of laundry detergent, not sweat. Over the shirt, I wear my Patagonia light puffer jacket, and the North Face rain shell. I wear my wool hat and my headlamp, the first time I’ve hiked with it and one of the few times I’ve used it at all (since my small red flashlight was usually fine for getting around in camp).

At the last moment, I decide not to wear my heavy snow gloves and instead just keep the thin gloves I’ve been wearing for most of the trip. This decision turned out to be a mistake — sunrise was hours away and my hands got super cold holding my poles. Combined with the tingle of a full dose of Diamox, my hands were uncomfortable from our 4:06am departure until the sun was high enough to raise the temperature around 7am.

Today’s hike is a very long, very very slow slog uphill with a huge number of winding switchbacks. The pace was glacial, perhaps 1/3 as fast as a slow walk. For most of the hike I was worried about my belly — there was no place to poop this morning that would not be horrifically awkward.

Around an hour in, I notice a painful level of pressure in the back right part of my head. I assume it is an altitude effect and as it worsens, my worry builds that I’ll soon have to turn back. After a few minutes of increasing pain and worry, I tentatively take both of my poles into my left hand and use my right hand to check whether rubbing my skull will have any impact on the pain. My hands meet the large solid plastic buckle of my headlamp that I’ve long forgotten that I’m wearing. I shift the buckle and the pain vanishes. I’m so relieved that I laugh out loud. My confidence soars. Nothing’s going to stop me.

The sun starts to come up and dramatically lights up Mawenzi Peak. We take short water breaks every hour or so.

When we look back at how little distance we’ve covered, it seems almost like a joke. In this photo, our camp is 6 hours’ hike behind us, and Barafu Camp an hour behind that.

We pass by a number of small groups coming down from the summit and applaud their success. We see one guy being hustled down the mountain just before Stella Point, clearly in bad shape.

Finally, we crest the crater rim at Stella Point at 11:01 am, perhaps an hour behind schedule.

While relieved to have reached the rim, I still feel bloated and uncomfortable at Stella, and my self-measured oxygen saturation is an absurdly low 72%. My pulse has been at ~120 all morning. We can see the sign at Uhuru Peak from Stella, and Jason uses his Galaxy S23 camera’s insane zoom to read the sign from where we stand, an impressive feat. “So, does that mean we don’t even need to go over there?” I joke.

We were offered a small picnic lunch, of which I forced myself to eat around half, although I was not hungry.

After forty-five minutes or so, lunch is over and we embark on the hike around the crater rim to Uhuru Peak. It looks so close, but it’s around a mile away and another 500 feet up. We’re still walking super slowly and I worry about my belly most of the way. We take some nice pictures of the depressingly vanishing glaciers along the path.

Shortly afterward, Jason drops his phone and it begins to slide down the scree beside the trail. Fortunately, he manages to grab it before it’s gone forever. I bend down to pick up a piece of volcanic rock and my camera tumbles out of the top of my pack, hitting the ground hard. Oops. It doesn’t seem to take much damage, thankfully.

At one point I realize that my belly is literally bulging and that’s going to be visible in my all important pictures at Uhuru Peak. Ugh.

Finally, around 12:56pm, we reach the sign at Uhuru Peak and picture taking begins. We’re lucky as it’s only our group — all of the morning crowds are gone, and we only saw a few small parties of threes and fours on the rim at all. A cloud rolling in seems to be waiting patiently for us to depart.

We take many combinations of photos in front of the sign. There’s not a ton else to see, alas, as the cloud cover again precludes seeing the ground. We snap some photos of the glacier inside the crater and a faded plaque adjacent to the sign.

Robert sits on a rock and reads a letter his wife wrote him to open at the top and seems moved by it. I hop up on a small boulder rock behind the sign, as I decide I should make really sure that I hit the highest point on the continent. Although, to be honest, it kinda looks like we might’ve been a few feet higher than this on a hill we crossed on the way here. It’s hard to say.

After ten minutes of wandering around, I finally fart (so so much flatulence on this trip, OMG) and feel much better, although I still worry that I’m not going to make it through the 2.5-3 hour descent back to Kosovo. After 5 more minutes of milling about, half of the party (including my brother who has a headache) decide to start the descent. I’m feeling pretty good now, with my oxygen saturation having improved to 82%, but I figure that I’ve achieved what I’ve come to achieve and heading back is the smart move.

My porter, one of the dozen that made the ascent with us, grabs my daypack as I’m putting it on and brings it back to camp, a huge and unexpected treat even though it’s probably under 10 pounds at this point.

Pausing back at Stella, our half of the group further splits into a “fast” and “slow” set, with the older folks bringing up the rear. Seeing the wind drive up the dust, I put on my balaclava for the first time.

Our trip back started out rough — downhills are hard, especially over the loose scree, and we’re not doing as many switchbacks as we did on the way up. Liza has a porter on each arm hustling her down the mountain and we joke that she really is the Princess of the tribes. At one point, the cloud cover perfectly frames Mawenzi:

Before long, we’ve finished the treacherous parts and we get to the best part of the day and one of the most fun parts of the trip– “skiing” down through the dust and scree with my poles. It was fun and fast — our 8 hour ascent is reversed with just a 90 minute descent back into camp.

As we climb a small hill back into camp, I tease my brother about some shortcut he takes and joke “Hey, that’s cheating!” He smirks and points at the porter carrying my pack a few feet in front of us. I blush. “Fair enough.“

When we reach camp, porters have pulled out the chairs from the dining tent for us to sit in outside of our tents. They serve us cups of fruit juice while swatting the dust off our boots and pants. I never did put on the gaiters I was told to carry, but it didn’t matter– I still had no rocks in my tall Quest 4D boots, and my pants dusted off pretty cleanly as well.

Within a few hours, all of our hikers have made it back to camp. There’s a birthday celebration for Robert, who’s just turned 70, and we all share a cake brought up for the occasion.

I don’t write any more in my journal today. Tired and happy, I expect we’ll all sleep well tonight. I fall asleep around 7pm.

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Wednesday, July 5, 2023; Day 6

I slept okay last night with long periods awake, turning a story over in my mind, the details of which I’ve since forgotten. At 5:50am I sat up when I heard the coffee crew preparing their hot water, and Jason broke the night’s silence with a joke: “You’re like a dog waiting for his treat.” I laughed out loud.

It’s cold out. The thermometer says the tent is around 35F, but my bathroom trip at midnight wasn’t too bad. I should’ve worn my glasses to better see the constellations, but the bright full moon would’ve spoiled it somewhat anyway. It was so bright I didn’t even need my flashlight for the walk to the toilet tent.

Respicius left early to hike ahead and find out if anything can be done about our unsuccessful reservation at the Kosovo/Respicius camp. I assume that some sort of bribe is involved. If we can’t stay at Kosovo, we’ll have to base camp at Barafu instead. The advantage of continuing past Barafu to Kosovo that base camping at the latter results in an easier summit day with 700 feet less climb. Kosovo is a smaller specialty camp; in our initial briefing, Respicius told us that he’d helped establish the site in the 90s. It was apparently contentious among the different factions of tour companies on the mountain and was nicknamed “Kosovo” in light of the ongoing Kosovo war in Europe. Now, more than 20 years later, that conflict is long over and Respicius said he’d petitioned that they rename the camp after him. As with many of his stories, we can’t really tell if he’s pulling our leg. I’m resigned to either and not getting my hopes up for a last minute save… we’ve come this far, and we can handle either.

Sunrise at Karanga is beautiful, and my brother is fixated on a strange visual phenomenon where there’s a giant triangle in the sky. I’m convinced that it’s somehow a shadow of the mountain, although I can’t really figure out the mechanics of it.

Breakfast was uneventful and the first two hours of slow and steep hiking passed in a blink as I zoned out and just let the rhythm guide me. One step after another, pole pole. “Pole Pole” is perhaps the most common mantra on Kili, meaning “slowly, slowly”, and while our pace has always been slow, it’s getting slower, and our pace tomorrow to the summit will be so slow as to seem like a parody of movement.

At hour three, on a mostly featureless uphill plain, a radio call reveals that not only have we been cleared all the way to Kosovo, but also the last three of our trekmate’s luggage had arrived and was on its way up the mountain. There was much rejoicing.

Along the way, we watched two helicopters fly by — one for a medical evac and one allegedly for the son of some government minister or something, who’d summitted but didn’t want to hike out.

We arrive at Barafu just after 11 and are led in a song at the sign:

After a short water break in the Barafu camp (where I peed in the outhouse/pit latrine, tl;dr: pretty gross), we continued on up a steep rock wall where our hands were as important as our poles. This would’ve been a brutal climb to try to do in the dark at 3am had we been forced to base camp at Barafu.

Along the way, we encountered our first two finishers (Canadians) who were on their way back down to their base camp at Barafu, looking tired but happy after a 12 hour day.

The lunchtime hike was a relatively short one (around an hour) and we soon arrived at our makeshift camp just outside the official Kosovo camp entrance. Our position along the trail lets us watch as other groups pass by.

As I write in my journal, the sing-song call of “Washy washy” summons us trekkers to lunch. It has long annoyed me (when entering the dining room on cruise ships) as it seems vaguely racist, but that’s probably mostly due to one of my dumb floormates in my freshman year of college.

Lunch is a pair of yummy corn fritters with guacamole, pineapple slices, and salad. We exchange real-world contact information (emails, addresses, and Instagram handles) so we can share pictures after we land back home.

Kosovo Camp is just shy of 16000 feet, and my lunchtime check of my oxygen saturation measures at 88%.

The Doc was curious to see what medical gear the team carried, so they pulled it all out and inflated the pressure bag.

I send a text or two before a solo pre-dinner walking photoshoot.

From here, we’re finally close enough to see how we might get up the mountain.

It gets cold fast when the sun moves behind Kili, which casts a long shadow over our tents and a rough helipad. Mawenzi Peak is visible from one side of the camp

…while Mount Meru is visible from the other.

The pre-dinner excitement is the arrival of our trekmates’ luggage; Sherri and Jason H are very excited that they’ll have their carefully selected (and warmer) gear for the summit.

I’m bundled up for dinner at 6 and I think my daypack is all set for the ascent.

We have our final briefing before summit day and now it’s time to repack my day pack, removing everything I don’t need to carry to the summit. I decide to bring my big camera, but leave its bag and the long lens behind at camp. We’ll be returning here, so we don’t need to pack up our tents before the hike, as the vast majority of our porters will remain behind with our camp. Our briefing says there will be no tent coffee service tomorrow, a 3am wakeup for a 4am departure. With two hours of hiking in the dark before sunup, it’s expected to be super cold. I ask whether we should pack our YakTrax for walking on ice; Respicius suggests we should “just in case”, but his three assistants shake their heads and overrule him. They’re wise– we ultimately won’t come within 50 feet of anything frozen on the ascent, and even those are just tiny patches of water frozen in shade.

I’m excited, but eager to get to sleep. 3am is really early, and tomorrow will be a very long day.

At dinner, Jason H mentioned that our best chance of great views of the stars will be not long after sundown, but I figure I’ll see them if I wake to go to the bathroom. An expert at stellar photography, he captures some insanely amazing images, but I won’t see them until weeks after returning to the US. I’m a bit sad that I didn’t see anything nearly as amazing as this with my own eyes, but I’m delighted to have them anyway.

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Tuesday, July 4, 2023; Day 5

I slept okay last night, with no real nasal congestion unlike the night before, and the camp quieted down eventually. I had a few 1+ hour stretches of sleep. I jotted in my journal while enjoying my 5am coffee and wondering just how freezing my post-coffee bathroom trip will be. The thermometer on my pack indicates that it’s 40F in our tent. Ox has settled at 92%. After breakfast, we’ll be departing at 6:45am.

While waiting for the camp to pack up after breakfast, I wander around and take more photos of both the exotic plants and the morning clouds.

From here, it’s hard to see how exactly we’re going to get up this wall.

Our easy path out of camp and down from the plateau doesn’t reveal much about what’s to come:

Minutes after leaving camp, we cross a little bridge over a small valley and a tiny half-frozen river fed by a small waterfall:

We get to the base of the wall and, while the path is steep, it’s nowhere near the “straight up” it looked like yesterday. We can’t use our poles because we need both hands for the climbs. Respicius doesn’t like how my pack was holding my poles so he attaches them to his pack instead.

The scramble up Barranco Wall turns out to easily be my favorite part of the trip so far. It reminds me of easy climbs as a kid with my parents near where I grew up.

We’ve managed to leave early enough that there aren’t too many porters passing us with giant bags balanced atop their heads, but there are enough darting around to make it clear how easy we’ve got it.

A bit over halfway up, we encounter the “kissing rock”, so named because you have to hug it to get by, and, well, if you’re already hugging a boulder, why not give it a kiss while you’re at it? Before the trip, I’d idly pondered whether I’d actually put my mouth on some random rock in Tanzania, but when I actually get there, I’m so exhilarated that I plant a great big smooch.

We climbed for another half hour or so, pausing to doff our outer layers and take some epic mountainside photos.

Not long after, we make it to the top, drop our bags, take some photos, and eat some snacks.

After hanging out at the top of the wall for fifteen or twenty minutes, we began our descent on the other side. We cross a series of wide plains following trains of porters ahead of us.

After crossing the sandy plains, we eventually reach areas more interesting vegetation and a steeper ascents and descents. The final descent proves slightly easier than yesterday’s down from Lava Tower, but I felt a knee twinge at the end of the downhill that worries me… knees definitely seem like my weak point.

There was one final steep ascent into camp, an intimidating climb, but I was excited that we were almost there. As we caught our breath and grabbed a drink at the bottom, our porters unexpectedly appeared (“Look, the Easter Bunnies!” joked the Doc) and relieved us of our packs for the climb.

Karanga camp looks much like our prior two, with our tents overlooking the sea of clouds below:

The views from the camp are amazing and I text a few of them to some new friends from Austin who’d wished me well on the trip.

Mount Meru remains the only ground feature visible through the thick bed of white clouds below. A few large birds circle lazily on the gusts of wind.

It’s bright and sunny and the thermometer in my pack reports it’s just under 60F. The camp is covered in scree, making my use of Crocs as camp shoes a bit treacherous. The dust isn’t as overwhelming as it has been in places on the trail. The summit feels close, and we’ve reached our first explicit warning sign.

I jot in my journal in my tent waiting for lunch at 1PM.

After lunch and wandering around taking pictures, I’m back in the tent jotting in my journal at 3:54pm, killing the last few minutes before “afternoon tea”, the highlight of which remains not the tea (which I’ve tired of) but instead the bowls of plain popcorn.

I muse that while there’s so much to see, my eyes are not to be trusted. What looks like a trail that goes up vertically is a manageable slope when you get closer or change your perspective. Between the bright sun and the polarized lenses of my sunglasses, and the red-orange light of the sleeping tent (all red items appear orange) to the green hue inside the toilet tent, half of the day looks like a miscalibrated TV set.

At dinner, Robert leads a toast for the 4th of July and we cheer our active and former service members. After dinner, Respicius reveals some news: apparently, our reservation for our planned pre-summit camp didn’t go through — if we can’t stay at our planned Kosovo/Respicius camp, our summit day will be a lot more difficult, with an extra 700 foot climb several hours before dawn. Respicius will hike ahead of the group in the morning to meet the rangers at the camp to try to resolve the problem. I am at peace… what will be will be.

Wherever we end up by tomorrow night, we’ll be sleeping at our final camp before our summit bid.

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Monday, July 3, 2023; Day 4

I didn’t feel quite as cold last night, and I got a solid amount of sleep. I had two mild-but-elaborate nightmares though, both featuring my ex. Ugh. I was a little congested, which is worrisome, but there’s so much dust in the air that blowing my nose leads to a gritty tissue stained dark brown, a common complaint from others.

I didn’t need the bathroom all night. I jotted in my journal while finishing up my morning coffee in the tent awaiting the call to breakfast. Today we’ll hike from camp to the Lava Tower at 15000 feet, lunch there, and then descend to camp at 13000 feet. Supposedly, today will be the second hardest hiking day of the trip, but I feel strong. At breakfast, my oxygen saturation measures at 92%.

We pack, huddle, chant/sing, and set off up the same trail we climbed yesterday afternoon.

While my thumb-shirt protects the base of my hands, I haven’t been applying sunblock to my knuckles regularly enough:

The hike to Lava Tower is a long uphill, but painless. I worried about my gurgling belly for a while, but had no problems.

The combination of a great adventure, close quarters, tents (which provide visual isolation but no sound dampening at all), sharing of meals, and hours-long walks has caused our group to develop a rapid, if uneven, intimacy. Never before have I known the state of so many adults’ bladders and bowels, and what they achieved the last time they went to the toilet tent. (Constipation is a real problem for some, while my fear is the opposite problem). The combination of our diet, altitude, exercise, and hiking in a line leads to a frequency of nearby flatulence unexperienced anywhere else. Some of us try to awkwardly ignore it, while our Air Force trekker gleefully calls out “Air Power!” after each fart. What else can you do?

We’ve mostly settled on nicknames — the Doctor is, predictably, “Doc“, Jason H has been dubbed “Gadget” (he’s got a fancy 360° camera, and a 2-way GPS that uploads our location to the internet over satellite), and I continue to answer to an occasional “REI.” An attempt to nickname Bob as “Casper” (for his heavy facial sunblock) doesn’t really take off, perhaps because it seems a little unkind. Respicius is now commonly called “Suspicious Respicius” (mostly by Liza) due to his minor and good-natured deceptions.

Our guides periodically pause beside the trail to cheer us on and ask how we’re doing as we pass. I’ve gotten in the habit of replying “All is bliss,” a line I’ve cribbed from The Great, and which has delighted me since it was first mentioned.

While we wait for lunch, we survey the Lava Tower, Kili (which feels close enough to touch), and the trail that led us here:

Our dining tent is set up at the foot of the tower, perhaps 50 feet away from a sign warning about not getting too close to the rocks. 😬

Lunch is a tasty chicken noodle soup and spaghetti.

While I felt great, my Ox has declined to 84%, a figure that would lead to a race to the hospital under normal circumstances. After lunch and a trip to the bathroom, it was time to get our packs back on.

Our “easy” post-lunch downhill to Barranco proves more challenging than our morning’s hike. Leaving the camp involved climbing down a steep set of rocks, and later the trail was slippery in spots; three of us fell. Norm fell less than a foot in front of me and I felt guilty that I didn’t catch him, as my hands were wrapped in fists around my poles. He’s incredibly tough, however, and pops back up in seconds. Minutes later, Robert slipped and hurt his knee and ended up spending the evening in his tent after the Doctor gave him something from her bag.

As we approach Barranco, we see some of the most interesting landscape and flora of the trip so far.

We’re all excited when the camp finally comes into sight, again next to a sea of clouds, with the famous Barranco Wall close by.

I have a headache coming into Barranco at 13K, but attribute it not to altitude but instead to being tired from carrying my pack, which felt heavier than usual. I decided that I’d probably leave my camera behind for the summit day.

The mountain feels really close now, even if I can’t fathom how we’ll get up it.

Dinner is chicken over rice with a delicious fried/breaded banana dessert.

Our after-dinner briefing reveals that tomorrow’s trek sounds short but perhaps hairy — thousands of people (the vast majority of them porters) will take a long, narrow, and winding cliffside path up the mountain to the Karanga camp. But we’re slated to arrive by lunch, and will have the afternoon to relax, at around the same altitude as here in Barranco.

I cross my fingers for a good sleep tonight; we’ll have an extra early wakeup at 5am tomorrow in the hopes of getting up the famous Barranco Wall before the crowds arrive. I’m excited!

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