“Let’s do this.”
He nodded with the same nervous enthusiasm that I felt. We headed down to the lobby. My ankles and legs were now numb rather than sore, and I took that as a good sign. Outside the hotel, a shuttle van waited. The other members of our team were already loading their bags.
“Good morning, brother,” Paul said, giving me a bear hug that almost lifted me off the ground. “Are you ready?”
“Oh, yeah, big-time ready,” I said with a half laugh.
Tim gave me a quick hello, but he was busy checking in all the bags. Our whole team, numbering ten including the documentary crew, was shuffling around the van. Occasionally we looked at each other, then away, as if to say, I know what you’re feeling, because I feel the same, but let’s just not talk about it.
We clambered into the van, and I scored the seat on the left-hand side by the door, so I could stretch out as much as possible. It was a three-hour trip to the entrance of Kilimanjaro State Park. From there, it was another hour to where we would begin our climb. The driver shut the door, and the van sputtered to life. The clunker, a former airport shuttle, must have been thirty years old. Its engine sounded about as powerful as a lawnmower’s.
The first half of the trip was cheerful, with lots of small conversations going on, but once we cleared Arusha and the sun began to rise, things got quiet. I stared out the window, watching the occasional motorcycle zooming past or Tanzanians emerging from their small roadside shacks. Eventually, the landscape cleared into long stretches of sugarcane fields, and I imagined the climb ahead as Tim had explained it to us.
There were many routes to the summit of Kilimanjaro. Some were short and steep, challenging the hardiest climbers; others followed a relatively gentle slope and were supplied with sleeping huts. Tim had chosen the Shira Route, and although not especially technical (we were told), it was one of the longest, most remote, and most strenuous climbs. Approaching the summit from the west, the Shira Route offered some of the most beautiful scenery, but there were no huts, and we would set out at a high elevation, which meant we would have less time to acclimatize.
For seven days, we would trek across moorlands, ice fields, lava ridges, alpine deserts, and steep barren trails of pulverized volcanic rock. We would hike more than 64 miles from beginning to end and climb over 10,000 vertical feet. The higher altitudes would starve our bodies of oxygen, and temperatures would range from the high 50s during the day to below zero at night. The unpredictable weather on the mountaintop might also bring hurricane winds, rain, and even sleet and snow. No short, quick, and easy for us.
Yet as the bus rumbled down the highway, I felt confident as ever in my ability to summit Kilimanjaro. Tens of thousands of others had. I would do the same. After all, I had always held my own as an athlete (with a lot of determination and stubbornness). With everyone but my brother Mike, I measured stroke by stroke in the ocean. On the basketball court and soccer pitch, I may not have been the best, but I was okay. I had a few dozen trophies and ribbons to prove it. A half marathon—boom, I ran 16 miles instead, on the sparest of training. A marathon—it hurt, but I finished.
Nearing the Londrossi Park Gate, our bus’s lawnmower engine was clearly tiring. I doubted its ability to get us up to the Shira Plateau, still a long windy climb up a hole-pocked dirt road. At the gate, we piled out, glad to stretch our legs as we signed into the park and its officials checked our passports and made sure we had the right permits to climb Kilimanjaro. Tim introduced us to our Tanzanian lead guides, Bariki and Moody, both of whom said hello in English, gave us a short smile, and then hurried off to inspect our bags and equipment, which their porters would be taking up the mountain to our campsites.
After a lot of shuffling back and forth, we loaded back onto the bus and headed out. A few minutes away from the gate, we came upon a broken-down jeep with a couple dozen porters sitting on its roof and on the side of the road. A moment later, they were crammed onto our bus, taking up the few free seats or finding spaces in the aisle. There was a lot of joking and bantering in Swahili.
The bus chugged up the steep, bumpy road, sounding as if it was about to quit at any moment. We were moving at barely a crawl. It quickly became hot and stinky, but whenever someone opened a window, the dust from the road would swirl in and choke us.
I was now squashed into my seat, unable to move, and my legs began to hurt. I tried to think of something other than how slow and long this ride to the plateau was going to be, but I was restless and in pain. I tried to stand, but there were so many ruts in the road that I was almost thrown from my feet. Dilly was sitting behind me, looking as though he might hurl his breakfast into his lap. I couldn’t have been a much better sight.
“Almost there. Very close, very close,” Bariki kept saying, with a bit of a laugh. He was taller and lankier than our other guide, and he seemed to be perpetually amused by us.
After an hour, I knew I had to get off the bus. I would rather walk.
“Stop,” I told the driver.
We were going so slow, it was hard to tell if he even needed to put on the brake. The door clattered open, and I staggered off. Paul followed right behind me. I was more certain than ever that he would be my protector throughout the climb.
“Any lions or elephants?” I asked Bariki.
“Not usually,” he said, shaking his head.
Paul and I hiked up the side of the road. Moody followed us out, and then the bus clambered on past the three of us in a cloud of dust. It was good to be free and finally hiking. A half mile later, we reached the launch point of the Shira Route. Some of our porters were already there, preparing lunch. The two cooks were wearing tall white chef’s hats. Given that we were in the middle of Kilimanjaro National Park, surrounded by thick jungle in one direction and a long stretch of moorland in the other, the hats were one of the most hilarious things I had ever seen.
As we ate, the bus drove away, and the porters departed up the trail to our first campsite. Low clouds hung over the plateau, obscuring any sign of the summit we were aiming to reach. Over the course of our lunch, the wind began to pick up, and we had to keep our hands on our paper plates to keep them from blowing away.
Soon enough, Tim said we should be heading out. Our first day would be an easy three- to four-hour hike of 4 miles, rising little more than 1,000 feet. It would help us acclimatize.
I raised my tin cup and hollered, “Game on! It’s about to get real!”
Everyone on the team clanked cups and cheered, then gathered their backpacks. It was almost 50 degrees, and I was hot. I was wearing thin long johns under my black cargo pants and matching Patagonia fleece jacket. Better to be prepared, Tim had warned, as the temperatures could swing at any moment. With Moody in the lead, we set off.
On day one of our climb, spirits were high. We moved in single file across the moorland. The pace was relaxed, the dirt trail was easy to follow, and we were all eager to finally be starting. A half hour into our journey, I definitely could feel that I was breathing more heavily than normal because of the elevation, but it was nothing that slowed me down. My ankles and feet felt the best they had since the Whitney climb—no doubt, I figured, because of the adrenaline of getting started.
The trail threaded through the moorland, which was blanketed in low brownish-green shrubs. From time to time we passed piles of boulders that looked as though they had been hurled off Kilimanjaro eons before. As we descended into our first valley, a light rain began to fall. Mitch, one of the documentary crew, pulled out an umbrella and rigged it on his backpack to protect the scores of batteries he and Kent had brought. Soon, the wind caught the umbrella and turned it inside out, and Mitch looked as if he was carrying a radar installation on his back. We got a good laugh, one of many that day.
“This thing is no problem,” Dilly said, feeling confident in view of the leisurely pace.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “We got this.”
We crossed a dry riverbed and then climbed back up a zigzagging tr
ail. Tim and Shirley pointed out various flowering plants and birds to each other, while Moody and Bariki spoke to each other constantly in Swahili.
“They’re probably talking about your mom,” Dilly joked.
I felt great and kept a steady rhythm. Occasionally the documentary crew ran ahead of me to frame a shot before asking me to slow down and say something. Pretty soon, I tuned them out. The key with my body was to keep moving. Once I stopped, my muscles wanted to tighten and lock up. They quickly understood this and adjusted their way of working.
Only Nancy, our team grandmother, was having problems. From our arrival in Arusha, we were all worried about her level of fitness. Nancy had joked that she only trained while washing dishes and walking around the block in her boots. Now on the trail, she was slowing and stopping repeatedly. Bariki kept at her side, and they gradually fell back in the distance.
“Okay, we go,” Moody said at one point, waving us onward when we had paused to wait for her. He was a man of few words, and I figured he would do the same if I were the one lagging behind. Over the next few hours, we made our way up and down a few more ravines, but otherwise the trail seemed almost flat. As the sun waned from the sky, the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. We hiked along the Shira Ridge and finally came to a clearing where the porters had set up our camp. Each of us had a small blue egg-shaped tent, with a low profile to protect it from the wind. Beside these was a larger mess tent.
“All right, that’s a wrap,” I said.
Dilly, Paul, and I gave each other a chest bump, feeling pretty good about ourselves. We retired to our tents to take off our boots and unload what we needed from our backpacks—toiletries and the like. As I bent down to get inside, I suddenly became light-headed. It was the first time the altitude had really hit me, and it was a sobering moment. I unrolled my sleeping bag and tried to figure out how I was going to stretch out my body in such a small space. Only if I lay diagonally would my feet not stick out of the front of the tent.
While I was working this out, Tim called for us. We gathered beside him near the mess tent, wondering what the problem was. Then he pointed in the distance, away from the setting sun.
“The clouds are clearing at the summit,” he said excitedly.
I only saw the same clouds that had been hanging over the mountain the whole day.
“No. Higher,” Tim said, tilting my head upward.
I angled my head another 20 degrees, and there it was: the summit. Way, way, way higher and much, much, much farther away than I had ever imagined it would be. Mouth agape, I tried to come to terms with the amount of effort it would take to reach it. It was the first time I fully realized what I was facing in the days ahead. For a moment, those scenes from the Everest documentary I had seen, those scenes that first inspired me to dare a climb, raced through my mind: summiteers gasping for air, fighting through snow, ice, and wind, traversing precipitous cliffs, a single misstep sure death. Kilimanjaro was no Everest, but it was still a dangerous monster, and I was left with a hollow, scared feeling in my chest.
“Whose idea was this anyway?” I joked, trying to find a way out of the tension I felt.
“Climb without limits, right?” Dilly said, making fun of my fund-raising motto.
“I’m starting to think there might be limits,” I said. “But I guess there’s no turning back.”
“But it’s so far away,” somebody on the team marveled.
“Twenty miles until we reach the main part of the mountain,” Tim advised.
Now that the sun was down, the temperature plunged below freezing. I bundled up in several layers and then went over to the mess tent, finding my way by the narrow sliver of light cast by my headlamp. The surrounding darkness was impenetrable. The porters had set up a couple of square tables, one with a single sad flower in a glass in the middle of it. The stark scene, with the wind buffeting the blue tent and a couple of lanterns providing the only light, made that flower seem all the more ridiculous.
“How romantic,” Paul said.
We all ate together. Starving, I shoveled down the pasta and garlic bread. Tim gave us a breakdown of the next day’s climb, then two key tips for the night: one, drink a lot of water, the altitude will dehydrate you; two, never leave your tent to urinate without a headlamp (you risk stepping off a cliff and dying—“It happens, a lot,” he said). We took bets on who would freeze to death first, Dilly or Jeff, the documentary crew’s cinematographer, who had rented a sleeping bag in Arusha.
Nancy remained quiet throughout dinner, and I worried she might not make it through the next day. She had been last to reach the camp and had struggled to walk steady and straight as she came up the trail.
Back in my tent by 8 P.M., I burrowed down inside my sleeping bag, exhausted but unable to sleep. Overall, I felt good about the day. My legs were in decent shape, the braces were helping my feet, and so far the altitude had not affected me too much. The distant view of the summit had been a reality check, but I told myself that we would chip away at that mountain each day until we were at the top.
The tents were closely clustered, and there was the inevitable banter. Every few minutes, Dilly would chime out, “This sleeping bag sucks,” and everybody would laugh. Although I was nice and toasty inside my extreme-weather Marmot bag, it was impossible to get comfortable and be able to breathe at the same time, particularly with the bag’s hood drawn over my head to keep out the cold. I flipped from my stomach to my back like a hamburger. My heated breath turned the nylon by my mouth moist, which was kind of gross, and my arm fell asleep. Finally, I drifted off.
Throughout the night, I tossed and turned, and every time I woke up I drank water, as Tim had ordered. There was a disturbing symphony of snores and farts from the other tents; the altitude, I was learning, wreaked havoc on people’s systems. Every couple of hours I had to pee. The first time I put on all my clothes, pulled on my boots, and headed out a fair distance from my tent, as Tim had advised. Each time after that, I wore less and less and peed closer and closer. By the fifth time, I was outside in only my long underwear and Crocs, and thank goodness my tent was waterproof. It was freezing cold, and the wind was howling. “Welcome to Kilimanjaro,” the mountain was saying to me.
Lying like a mummy inside my sleeping bag, I tracked the rise of the sun by the changing shades of blue of my tent. Soon enough I heard footsteps and a call in broken English, “Good morning.” Before I wrestled my way out of my bag, one of the cooks unzipped my tent flap and stuck his head inside. He was holding a metal tray with an empty mug and two pots.
“Maji moto,” he said in Swahili, two words that meant “hot water,” but terms that I would come to associate with the start of another day of torture. On this particular morning, the start of day two, they were welcome words. I took plain water, no tea or coffee, and used it to clean my toothbrush and warm my hands.
After changing my underwear and socks but wearing the rest of the previous day’s clothes, I emerged from my tent. There was a crunch of frost underneath my feet, and the sky was a clear blue with wisps of clouds. Straight ahead in the distance was the summit, reminding me again of the challenge ahead. Tired after a restless night’s sleep, I stumbled across to the mess tent. All of us looked exhausted except for Tim, who was all relaxed, calm, and at ease, as if he were on a Tahitian vacation or something. Only Nancy was absent.
Over our breakfast of porridge, bananas, and bread with jam and honey, we spoke mostly of how cold it had been during the night. Finally, Nancy appeared. She looked disheveled, her eyes not quite focusing, and she seemed down. Everybody said good morning, but it clearly wasn’t one for Nancy. She remained quiet through the rest of the meal, as Tim went over the day’s five-hour hike.
When the others went off to gather their backpacks, Nancy drew me aside. “I had a lot of problems sleeping last night,” she said.
“Do you think it was your pad?” I asked.
She shook her head no.
I then suggested how she
might better position herself in her bag, but she cut me off.
“I’m having trouble breathing. I’m tired after yesterday, and it was the first day, an easy one.” She paused. “I can’t continue.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, though I agreed it was probably best she stop.
“I was hoping to make it to final base camp to see you off, but I can’t.”
I gave her a hug. She looked as though she needed one.
“I wish you could be there. But your coming here, supporting me, it’s enough.”
Soon after, we headed out in the same single line as the day before. A half hour into the hike, Nancy said her farewells and turned down a supply road with one of the porters for a rendezvous with a truck. It was the last time such an option would be available. Any higher, and you would have to stagger off the mountain on your own steam—or be hauled down. As we left Nancy, I did feel relief that I would not have to worry about her higher up on the mountain. But her struggles were a sure sign of this mountain’s inability to forgive any weakness.
We continued across the Shira Plateau toward the base of Kilimanjaro, traveling through the same moorlands as the day before. Every hour or so these huge black ravens swooped over us. They were as big as eagles and made this terrifying helicopter “swoosh, swoosh” across the sky. “Crows on ’roids,” Dilly called them.
Most of the day I followed behind Moody, watching the heels of his threadbare construction boots instead of the surrounding vistas, so as to keep my balance on the rock-strewn path. My feet began to cramp, and my breathing was strained.
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