Thither & Yon

I spent the night dreaming about getting up too late. It didn’t matter that I went to sleep at 8pm and would get seven hours of sleep by 3am; my brain said “3am is so early! you will be so tired!”

When Mandela knocked at 3am, I came awake with a sense of dread. It was time to do The Thing, or declare that I was too unwell to do The Thing. Doing The Thing would be very, very hard.

I checked in with my body. Head, shoulders, knees toes: all online and feeling fine. Heart and lungs: A+ all around. Tummy?

I was empty. I had not provided my body with much in the way of new fuel last night, leaving it with not much to complain about.

“You doing this?” Dustin asked as I clicked on my headlamp and felt around for my pants. Per Gideon’s instructions, we’d gone to sleep last night wearing everything but our outermost layers, prepared to make the early hour as painless as possible.

“For shirts? At least five layers,” he’d said. “Base layer, pullover, fleece, puffer coat, and on top, your raincoat. For your pants? At least three layers. Four is better. Long johns, warm pants, regular pants, and your rain pants.”

Have you ever worn four pairs of pants at once before? I’m here to tell you, it is too many pairs of pants. Before today, I would even have said it was an impossible number of pants to wear all at the same time.

“I will start, at least,” I answered Dustin. “Right now I feel pretty good. If that changes, I’ll make a new plan.”

Outside the tent, camp was very quiet. We’d heard some commotion as the bulk of climbers set off on their treks at midnight, but now everyone left was sleeping. Only our group had made the 4am choice today. Lights from a dozen nearby cities and towns twinkled at us from the savanna far, far below and a full moon shone brightly down, frosting the tents and stones with a cool glow.

“How are you feeling?” Gideon asked when we arrived in the dining tent, still groggy and now chubby with extra clothes.

“Okay. Good enough,” I said. I sat down and stared glumly at the bowl of porridge before me. It was 3:30am. Who can eat oatmeal at 3:30am? Who can eat anything at 3:30am?

“Chaji will carry your pack today,” Gideon said. I looked up in surprise, a protest coming automatically to the tip of my tongue. I don’t need someone else to carry my pack. I am perfectly capable…

No, I am officially down one notch of capability. I am battling a potentially serious disadvantage. Why would I say no to a measure of assistance that could make all the difference?

“Thank you,” I said. “That will be wonderful.”

Dustin was also offered a personal porter, but he turned him down. “I’ve carried my bag this far, I can take it to the top.”

We returned to our breakfast. Just oatmeal and toast today. I tried to eat the oatmeal, but I have slimy-food texture issues, and it just wasn’t working. I knew I had to eat something, so I pried the top off the peanut butter, which was the texture of play-doh at these temperatures, and tried to spread it on my toast. My mouth didn’t want it, my tum didn’t want it, but my brain made me eat half of it. It was the best compromise my parts could reach.

Headlamps on, we officially started our march at 4:15. Our summitting party consisted of our two guides, Gideon and Niko, with Gideon in the lead today; Dustin, Laura, Nyla, and Alfayo; Nyla’s porter Yona, Laura’s porter Chaji, and Omari, carrying water for the crew. Nine people, slow-stepping their way up the mountain in the dark.

I’ve come to believe that summiting at midnight or 4am has nothing to do with what time you reach the summit. You start so early so you can’t see the terrifying wall of rock before you. If it’s dark, your only option is to put one foot in front of the other again and again. Somehow, that is enough to accomplish miracles.

As we started, we could see the train of headlamps from midnight hikers winding its way toward the summit. Some of them, at least, would arrive for the sunrise.

As soon as you pass beyond the vast field of tents stretching across three plateaus of the Barafu arm, you come to a maze of tumbled boulders. Not as extreme as the Baranco Wall, this rockfield still required a lot of scrambling. Chaji, in addition to carrying my pack, went ahead of us on the trickier places and offered a hand for balance or even a little lift.

I’d worried about my ability to get enough to drink with my water riding on someone else’s back. I normally sippy-sip my way through my hikes, rather than chugging half a liter in a single go at breaktime. Chaji was always right on hand, though, and it was never a problem to holler, “Maji! Maji, tafadhali!” Four liters of water is recommended for the summit hike, but I’d packed five. Do you know what kills people who have dysentery? Dehydration. The water goes in and comes right back out again. I was worried.

My digestion problem persisted (and apparently I’m not the only one who suffered from this particular malady up here, given the shocking quantity of un-buried evidence), but as mentioned before: I was basically empty. A body can only cause so much trouble without ammunition.

We turned our headlamps off as the sun rose behind Mawenzi, Kilimanjaro’s second-highest peak, at 6:30. Now we could see how far we’d come, and it looked impressive, but we could also see how far we had to go. One step at a time. Step, step, step.

Sunrise behind Mawenzi: a series.

“Your steps are too big, Mama Simba,” I said at one point. To me, it looked like she was still trying to hike like a normal person at a normal elevation, with a normal-sized stride. “You can’t actually walk up here or you’ll wear yourself out. Think of it more like sneaking up the mountain. Try to take steps the size of your own feet. Heel to toe, one shoe-length at a time.”

“Uh huh, uh huh,” she agreed. “I just need to breathe.”

“Breathing is easier if you take small steps,” Dustin pointed out.

“Sixteen thousand feet!” I had announced as it came and went, then before we knew it, “seventeen thousand feet!” My energy and enthusiasm had grown steadily with the return of the sun and the continuing absence of problematic tummy troubles. I don’t think anyone else’s energy or enthusiasm could be said to be on the rise.

As we marched past 17,800, I marveled at my body. Yes, we were hiking literally .25 miles per hour, but I was killing it. I felt good, I felt happy. I wasn’t just going to do this, I was going to rock this.

Our crew occasionally burst into song, “Jambo Bwana” being a particular favorite, as its lyrics are infinitely adaptable to become words of advice or encouragement and even the tired white dudes can sing along with the “hakuna matata” parts. Among the Swahili words, we often picked out our names as their songs cheered us along, or called out landmarks we had passed.

“Eighteen thousand feet!” How had it been so easy?? If it weren’t for needing to peel off four layers of pants every time I needed to use a little girls’ rock (and that was really, truly, awful), this hike might be a lovely walk in the park!

Then, around 18,200 feet, my soul left my body. I don’t think this has ever happened to me before. I looked down at my feet, and they certainly weren’t mine. I had nothing to do with the way they were moving – step, step, tiny tiny step. Who was this person, and what was she doing? And more importantly, why was she doing it??

Then my soul snapped back into my body, and I discovered that I was miserable, tired and confused. How did my body keep moving? How could it continue to keep moving? Might I just crawl behind one of these rocks and rest? Forever?

This continued for another 200 vertical feet, when an epiphany hit me. I was starving. I was starving as literally as is possible for a soft, financially stable girl from a first-world country to be. I had eaten almost no dinner last night, almost no breakfast this morning, and easily done 2,000 calories of hiking so far today. The difference between how I felt an hour ago versus how I felt now could not be blamed on the altitude or some inherent deficiency in my body. I needed food.

I waved Chaji over. “I need snacks!”

“Snacks!” he laughed, and turned around so I could dig into my backpack. I had, at least, prepared well in the snacks department. I pulled out a package of chex mix, a package of almonds, a package of gummi worms, and a granola bar. I gobbled the chex mix down immediately – carbs and salt, carbs and salt! Here you go, body! Be well! Then I ate half the nuts. Protein! Fiber! Fats! My tum wanted nothing to do with it, but I swallowed it down, and topped it off with a double-dose of water. The gummi worms and granola bar – actually a brick of solid cranberries and nuts – I continued to nibble on as we proceeded up, up, up.

Within ten minutes I felt the calories spreading through my body and easing my existential dread. I felt like a contestant on one of those survival shows right after they finally catch and eat a frog after 17 days of having no food. “I feel the energy moving through me!” they always say even as they are still chewing. I get it now! I get it! (We shall ignore the fact that half of them get sick from their frog-diet and tap out.)

Even calories did not diminish the capacity of the eternal, tiny switchbacks to intimidate, though. I’d started eyeballing a ridge of snow shortly after sunrise. I’d looked at that ridge and thought, “that’s going to be a Trick Ridge. It looks like the top, but we’re going to get there and discover we have another 2,000 feet to go.” This was not true. Or, rather, it was a Trick Ridge, but its trick was that it was actually the top, but it was so much farther away than it looked. We kept going up and up and up, and not getting to that ridge.

Until suddenly, somehow, that snowy ridge was right there.

“I have to stop and breathe,” Nyla said. But the ridge was right there. Another fifty feet up!

“Can I keep going?” I asked Gideon, as he pulled off to the side with Nyla.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. He’d had six days to watch my pace. He knew I wasn’t going to start running now. I find that I can step step step almost infinitely at a slow enough pace, but if I stop to pause, it gets harder and harder to restart every time.

Niko and Dustin came with me, pole pole, one foot in front of another, straighten your leg, do it again. Step, step, step.

And suddenly there we were, on the crater rim. Stella Point, 18,883 feet. Higher than I’ve ever climbed before. My watch told me this much, then its battery sputtered out and died. Our climb, so far, had taken exactly eight hours, and we still had a mile and 600 feet up to go to the summit.

Nyla came staggering up over the ridge closely attended by Gideon and Yona.

“Mama Simba!” the whole crew cried. “You did it! Yeah!” There was cheering, high fives, fist bumps, and a few hugs. Mama Simba looked like she’d been put through a tumble-dry cycle, but here she was.

I scuttled (pole pole) around between the obsidian boulders, looking for the best view down into the crater.

“I bet we’ll have better views along the trail to the summit,” Dustin pointed out. We could see the trail arcing counterclockwise away into the snowfield.

“Water?” Chaji said, appearing with my pack.

“Always,” I agreed, then also helped myself to a package of Pirate Booty and a Snickers bar. Eat, body. I don’t care that you don’t want it.

I’d expected to do a bit more dawdling here, but five minutes later Gideon was ready to go.

“Sunscreen!” he said. “Sunglasses! Do you have experience walking on snow? Okay, we can save the crampons for later, then. Just two more minutes, then we need to start moving again.”

I looked over to Mama Simba. This was it. Was she going to stay here, or keep going? But I think Gideon knew what he was doing. He was hurrying us along because the day was marching on – it was already after noon, and you don’t want to be on the peak of a tall mountain too late into any afternoon – but I think he was also making sure Mama Simba didn’t have too much time to think about it. Maintain the inertia!

She allowed herself to be swept along onto the summit trail with the rest of us.

Compared to the slope we’d just conquered, the trail to the summit looked downright easy. The crater was encrusted with snow, worn down to a obsidian gravel path in certain places along the rim, where we hiked.

“That’s not pole pole,” I said to Mama Simba as she hustled – almost jogged! – to catch up with Gideon. “No hurrying on the mountain top!”

“Sorry, sorry,” she said. “He was getting ahead of us.”

“I guarantee he will not leave us behind,” Dustin said. “Small steps.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. The Swahili tendency to repeat words had caught hold of all of us.

In my mind, that last part of our hike happened in an instant. One minute we were leaving Stella Point, and the next minute the sign marking Uhuru Peak came into view around a drift of snow. I took a wee stop somewhere in the middle. Twenty minutes? Maybe thirty?

Nope. Dustin’s watch reports a 90-minute trip, and Nyla (asked to reflect upon it) says, “at least!” The distance stretched a little more than a mile and offered mostly kind inclines. Occasional patches of the trail were a bit slippery, but we hardy South Dakotans managed just fine.

“Can I walk on the snow?” I asked Gideon at one point. I wanted to get a slightly better view into the crater, but I know how temperamental snow can be and I didn’t have any experience with snow in this particular place.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” he said. I ventured out a few meters, craning for a better view of the awesome glacier on the other side of the crater.

“That’s far enough!” Gideon said, and I willingly pole-pole’d back to known safety. People who don’t listen to their guides on mountaintops because they think they know what they’re doing? Those are the people who die.

“I bet we can see the glaciers better from the summit,” Dustin said.

Glaciers! You know how I love them. (I love them so.) The Kilimanjaro glaciers – remarkable for even existing near the equator – are a hyper-endangered species. The oft-repeated line on the internet is that 85% of her glacial ice has vanished since 1912. Gideon says that in the twenty years he’s been guiding, they have shrunk by half. What remains is still awesome to behold, though.

The glacier that watched over us on our ascent was Rebmann Glacier (probably – the maps I could find are a bit dodgy). This lovely beauty, off the trail to our left as we made our summit approach, is probably is either the Decken or Kersten Glacier.

The big beastie off to the north should be the Drygalsky Glacier. The Furtwangler Glacier, the most famous because hikers could get immediate access to it along the Crater Camp trail, has become so small as to have been non-noticeable.

And suddenly (y’know, after an hour and a half), the sign marking the summit came into view. We straggled our way across the finish line. This time, it was all hugs, punctuated by bursts of song. Many, many photos were taken.

Having chosen the 4am start rather than the midnight start, we had the summit entirely to ourselves. We’d passed the other group on our way in, as they began their trip down. Solo summit-time is a fabulous luxury that most do not get. “You can wait in line half an hour for your photo,” Gideon told us of the midnight summiters. I was grateful for so, so many that we’d passed the oxygen test and opted to start late.

All very high things must come to an end, so after twenty minutes or so, we began our pole pole trudge back toward Stella Point. Because down is more treacherous than up when the path is icy, we pulled our crampons on before departing the summit.

And then we passed Stella Point and the real downhill part began. Ugh, downhill. I mean… I love going down! (Gideon says I must tell myself this.)

The downhill trail is separate from the uphill trail, to prevent congestion. The downhill trail is rather more direct, and is covered in loose scree. Scree is a nightmare when you’re going up, but can be your friend on the trip down. As long as you mind your balance, each step down can take you twice as far as a normal step as you slide and roll along with the gravel. On the down side, when a bunch of people are all doing it at once, it can get terrifically dusty.

Doing it for 2.5 hours also gets really old.

Fortunately, we got a break. Around 18,200 feet, the (somehow) smiling faces of some of our camp crew greeted us. They had hiked up 3,000 feet to bring us lunch. THREE THOUSAND FEET.

Hot chocolate, veggie sandwiches, other veggie empanadas, fresh fruit, cookies, muffins. This is awesome, in a very literal sense. Refills for our water bottles!

Dustin and Nyla had used up all their energy making it to the top, and couldn’t manage much in the way of food. My appetite was firmly back, and I demolished everything except the poor, stale muffins. I’d been sipping slowly on my last liter of water, desperate to make sure I had at least a little to get me all the way to the bottom. Getting a refill was a huge relief.

But even perfect breaks must come to an end, because there is only one way to get down this mountain. Down and down in the scree and dust forever.

I’ve probably never been so glad to see a tent in my life. By the time we made it, the time was 6:30. We’d been on the trail for 14 hours doing Very Hard Things. Our knees were rubber and our lungs much taxed. Our crew was all out to greet us when we arrived. More high-fives and fist bumps were passed around.

If we’d started at midnight, we would still have another FOUR HOURS of hiking to do after resting here for an hour. Have I mentioned enough times how grateful I am we were able to change our itinerary?

Mama Simba crawled into her tent. “I’m just going to rest for ten minutes,” she said.

“Are we going to see her again tonight?” I asked.

“No,” Dustin said. That had been my guess as well.

We were both wrong. Dinner was ready by 7, and when Mandela scratched at her tent, she came out to join us. Corn chowder, pasta with marinara, fresh veggies. My tum had gone a bit wobbly again, but I felt like I deserved to eat well and so I did.

“You have done an amazing thing,” Gideon said as we ate. “You should all be very proud of yourselves.”

“I can’t believe we did it,” Nyla said. She looked a bit shell-shocked. “I didn’t think I was going to do it. I thought I wouldn’t make it up. Then I thought I’d stay at Stella point. I don’t know how I kept going. I can’t believe it.”

“But you did it,” Gideon said. “You will remember this forever.”

“So…” I asked oh-so-casually. “What time do we start tomorrow?”

“Maybe we wake up at 7:30, you can have tea and wash water, breakfast at 8:30, we start hiking at 9?”

“Ohhh,” I sighed. “That sounds fine.” Everyone agreed with me.

With dinner so very late, we didn’t make it into our sleeping bags until 9:00.

“We’ve earned this,” I said as I snuggled deep into my cozy bag. “Ten and a half hours of sleep sounds just about perfect.”

“Lala salama,” Dustin agreed.