by Rob Simpson
An indelible image for all of us was the view from the main trail towards the top of the mountain in the dark. At various points above us, you could see the random and rare light from distant headlamps. The same below us: distant specks of light, in lines, creeping, turning this way and that, making their way up the mountain.
We also stared towards where we thought the sky met the top of the mountain. It still seemed a long way off, and we already felt like we had marched for an eternity.
A few minutes after we gained the main trail, we came across a little plateau where a group of trekkers were resting.
“We’re halfway to Gilman’s Point,” Aloyce informed us.
“Halfway!?”
“Holy shit, you’re kidding me!”
“Oh my God.”
We had three hours of climbing to go, working with a mental cocktail of fatigue and altitude sickness.
“Suck it up, boys. Let’s go.”
The next three hours consisted of climbing a switchback trail made up almost exclusively of loose rock. We dug in, and after a handful of water breaks, some team building words of encouragement, and some timely “pole, poles” thrown in, we finally arrived at Gilman’s Point. The last two hundred yards were excruciating on mind and body; the Point kept disappearing and reappearing as we wound and climbed our way through a labyrinth of rocks and boulders.
A few minutes after sunrise on July 4, 2008, we gathered at 18,650 feet.
A snow-filled crater sat a few hundred feet below us within the vast volcanic bowl of Kilimanjaro. Huge glaciers towered in the distance to the east and closer to us on the west side of the summit. Also off to the left, a narrow path up the ridge of ice and lava rock stretched out before us. It ran along the crater rim another kilometre and another 800 feet above us up to Uhuru Point, the highest point in Africa, an hour and a half hike from where we stood.
We took a few minutes at Gilman’s Point to celebrate and photograph our accomplishment. Out came the video cameras, and then out came the question.
“Who’s going on to Uhuru?” Brender asked. “Are you going on to Uhuru?”
“Yes,” I said. “There’s no chance in hell I’m not going at this point.”
I believe the small doses of Diamox anti-altitude-illness medication had helped me. I was exhausted but had no symptoms and felt determined. The others hadn’t taken it. I was disappointed to hear Chára and Lepik say they weren’t going.
“Too tired,” said Chára. “[I’m] exhausted. Completely out of energy.” He didn’t want to risk injury from fatigue.
Berg and Brender decided to give it a go. The three of us, along with Aloyce, his assistant, and three TV porters all began the trek up the trail.
A few minutes in, Brender had a change of heart.
“I’m gonna go back,” he said. Unfortunately for him, when he returned to Gilman’s Point, Chára and Lepik had already left to head back down the main trail. Unsure exactly where to go, particularly without a porter, Brender decided to wait two and a half hours for us to return. Not a good decision.
Meanwhile, Berg got a little goofy about halfway up the Uhuru trail. He doubted his ability to finish off the trip and was getting dizzy. Aside from us coaxing him, two other factors pushed him to the top. One was walking behind Aloyce step by step while they both held on to Aloyce’s walking stick horizontally. He was being towed, essentially. The other motivation and inspiration came from a passerby who was headed down from the top.
“If there are any Americans here, happy Fourth of July,” the young lady said.
Although I don’t consider myself particularly patriotic, the words provided a definite boost for me as well. It was cool our endeavor to the mountaintop occurred on such a significant date.
Damn right, I was thinking. Let’s celebrate a holiday on the top of Africa.
The path became snowy, icy, and slick the higher we moved. We picked and weaved our way to 19,350 feet. Out came the video cameras.
“I can’t believe we made it,” Berg said with a big smile.
“We’re here,” I said on camera, pointing to the wooden signage at the peak.
After ten minutes or so: Done. I could not wait to get off the top of that freaking mountain.
Me, a porter, head guide Aloyce, Mark Berg, and another porter at Uhuru Peak, the highest point in Africa.
We hustled as best we could back along the narrow crater path. Only twice were there spots where you had to be extra careful. A wrong step would mean falling hundreds of feet into the bowl. We arrived back at Gilman’s Point to find a zombie named Mark Brender.
Sitting at above 18,000 feet for almost three hours had turned Brender into one big massive headache. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t see straight, and he could hardly move.
Aloyce and I guided him down through the boulders and rocks near the top, and then Aloyce alone handled Brender the rest of the way down through the scree to Kibo Hut. Berg and I “skied” our way down through the loose rock.
At one point, a descending teenager above us somehow jarred loose a large rock that came thundering down the mountain towards me.
“Slider!” someone yelled. It missed my head by about two arm lengths and then missed a girl who was descending twenty yards below me by about six feet. Two or three times the size of a bowling ball and moving about twenty-five miles an hour, the rock would have killed one of us had we been hit. If it hadn’t mangled one of us immediately, it would have meant slow death by internal injury. There’s no MedEvac off Kilimanjaro.
For a few moments, I stared up at the kid and was ready to beat the shit out of him, but logic and fatigue almost immediately took over. Despite the near-death experience, I was mostly focused on “get me off this mountain.” Satisfying my anger would have meant walking back up.
For three hours we leapt, jogged, and slid down through the rocks to Kibo Hut, where Lepik and Chára had been waiting for hours. After swapping medical stories and tales from the top, we came to the realization that we still had another three hours to go. Fortunately, it was all downhill or flat to the next campsite, but still, we couldn’t believe we had three more hours of hiking. It had been twelve hours since the “day” began.
It was hot, it was dry, and for the only time in my life, I felt like I was actually sleeping as I walked. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Chára, Lepik, and Berg marched on ahead with a porter. Brender, Aloyce, and I lagged behind. At one point during a water break, I almost zonked out sitting on a bench. We peeled off layers as we went down through 14,000 feet.
By five thirty p.m., we arrived at Horombo Camp, a crowded and boisterous area along the main trail. With the descent, Lepik’s and Brender’s altitude symptoms fortunately subsided. I skipped dinner, sliced my blisters, and passed out. Dead to the world, I missed the sounds the others heard a few hours after dusk.
“Simba!” the Africans said. A lion had passed within a hundred yards of our tents, grunting in the darkness. The next day, we’d see its enormous paw prints on the trail.
Our final day involved six more hours of downhill trekking. Berg and I, the two oldest guys in the group, the two who had pushed to Uhuru on day five, were, not surprisingly, aching the most on day six. My feet were killing me, and Bergy had a legitimate hitch in his giddy-up.
“My knees are sore,” he said.
His limp spurred John Wayne comparisons. He walked like he had just hopped off his horse and was about to enter a saloon.
During the first part of the day, we strode through dry moorland and later crossed footbridges over small stream-clad valleys. Early in the day, there was actually a dusting of snow on a few of them. The second half of the hike, we descended through rainforest.
In fact, according to the locals, over the course of the previous twenty-four hours, we had travelled through every climate on Earth: glacial ice at the summit, all the
way down through rainforest at the bottom of the journey.
At one point along the trail, we observed black monkeys jumping around in the trees just above us. Aloyce had no other name for them, just “black.” They were very active, leaping over our heads from tree to tree and walking and eating very near to us at ground level. Cousins, if you will, of humans, they stared back at us like little kids, casually chewing on leaves and swinging around with the help of long opposable thumbs.
Further along, we walked beneath black-and-white colobus monkeys sitting in the canopy. They were much less active than their all-black relatives.
As we neared the national park gate and the village of Marangu, we came across small children, and later women, who came up from the village to beg. A German couple walking ahead of me stopped and gave a boy a dollar for a flower he had picked. The other locals simply asked for money, clothes, or whatever we could spare.
It was quite a reality check after being alone on the mountain.
Once we took the final few steps and were back at the national park gate, we bid farewell to the porters. We tipped them more generously than they were accustomed to. They applauded enthusiastically when Aloyce read out the gratuity amounts. He, his assistant, the cook, and the three porters who toted the TV gear earned extra. Among the twenty of them, they split about $800. We also gave them our boots, as is customary, and much of our gear and clothing. Chára gave away practically everything he had taken up on the mountain.
“These people can use everything they can get, and if I had more stuff, I’d give that to them as well,” Zdeno stated.
Bergy, Lepik, and Brender were generous as well. I couldn’t help out, unfortunately, as I had to return my rental clothes instead of give them away.
We bid the porters and Aloyce farewell, jumped into a Land Rover, and headed out through the gate, through the village of Marangu, toward the lodge.
There was a sense of relief, satisfaction, and sadness as we bid adieu to a group of men we’d never see again. Their faces were unforgettable, forever tied to our once-in-a-lifetime trek upon the great Kilimanjaro, an adventure that soon after it ended seemed more like a dream than reality.
We understood Chára rarely, if ever, drank. However, that night he and the rest of us gathered for a couple of beers at the lodge to reminisce.
When we started the trip, we saw Chára as an enormous, mean-looking, media-weary, fitness machine. By the end, he was a friendly, smart, sensitive world traveller. Image isn’t everything.
For him, I went from being the tall TV guy who
travelled with the team from the media he disliked to a sportscaster guy he could trust with information, who appreciated many of the same things in life as he did, and who had just summited a mountain.
Chára was appreciative of the camaraderie and the time spent, and he expressed little regret for tiring before the summit. On a Kilimanjaro postcard I asked him to autograph for my son, he wrote, “Hi Ian, your dad was the strongest of all of us. We had an unforgettable life experience. Your friend, Zdeno Chára, No. 33.”
~
Zdeno Chára still plays for the Bruins. The team won a Stanley Cup in 2011. He’ll be an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2018 at the age of forty-one.
Darryl Lepik left the NHL in 2009 and has been working in marketing and production in both New York City and Colorado.
Mark Berg, a thirty-year veteran of the production business, lives in metropolitan Detroit and is the owner of Great Lakes Teleproductions Inc. I last ran into him while covering the last ever Red Wings game at the Joe Louis Arena in April 2017.
Higher up the mountain: Simmer with Zee: Climbing Kilimanjaro Part 2
Reaching the summit, search: Simmer Hockey Odyssey Kili’
THE ITALIAN JOB
“Shot! Blocked down out to centre by Zetterberg . . . four seconds and three . . . the Gold goes to Sweden!”
Mike “Doc” Emrick’s call of the final seconds of 2006 Olympic Gold Medal Game
For four weeks in the winter of 2006, I spent my time in just five places in Torino, Italy. Aside from a quick side trip to Venice, I spent the entire pre-Olympic and Olympic experience in the “Detroit of Italy,” the home of much of the country’s auto industry. The five places included the Riberi Media Village where I slept a bit, drank late, and ate bad breakfasts; the Olympic media center where I ate other meals and schmoozed in the NBC commissary; the big rink (Palasport Olimpico), with the funky see-through seats; the Esposizioni (Espo-SEATS-zee-oh-nee) rink, which seemed thirty years older than it actually was; and the always festive Zelli’s wine bar, where I watched Today Show host Katie Couric dance on a table. She wasn’t the only one.
During the regular hockey season of 2005–06, I was an on-air TV guy in Boston, covering the Bruins for the New England Sports Network (NESN), but for the duration of the Torino Olympic Winter Games, I was the staff hockey researcher for NBC Sports. For the first time ever, the network was televising every men’s and women’s hockey game, regardless of match-up. Since there were so many games for the play-by-play announcers and colour analysts to do, and only so much time to prepare for all of them, I helped them with some of their research and preparation.
This meant going back and forth between the rinks pretty much all day, every day. For example, if Mike “Doc” Emrick and John Davidson were calling the Sweden–USA women’s semi-final game in one time slot but had the Slovakia–USA men’s game the next day, I’d be at the Slovakia practice taking notes and getting updates to pass along. If Kenny Albert and Peter McNab were calling Sweden–Russia men’s on Wednesday and needed info on Canada for Friday, I’d be freezing my ass off at one of the coldest practice rinks on the planet, getting injury updates and writing down quotes from Team Canada.
Our entire NBC Olympic hockey crew, minus me, who was at the practice rink getting notes about Team Sweden.
Fun stuff, eh? Damn right. It meant being helpful in hockey utopia, and with a dozen years of play-by-play experience, I knew to jot down what wouldn’t get in the official game notes.
During the day, this job was all-consuming. So much so, in fact, that I’m the only person (I think) missing from the massive NBC hockey staff photograph taken in the stands at the big rink midway through the Games. I vaguely remember seeing the notice on the food tent by the production trucks, “Hockey production team photo, everyone, 2:00 p.m., Palasport.” That couldn’t possibly include me, I thought. So while producers Gord Cutler and Carlos DeMolina and eighty-three other people on the hockey production staff were getting their picture taken, I was at the Team Sweden men’s practice, talking to Fredrik Modin about his groin.
When I saw the photo at the end of the Games, I was initially kind of bummed, but let’s face it, I have all the pictures of me I’ll ever need; now I had a photo of all the people I worked with at my first (and maybe only) Olympics.
The practice rink was attached to the Espo’ rink, but getting to it involved a long walk outside around the building. The stands were freezing, like hard-to-write, hard-to-even-move-your-fingers type cold. Limited access meant grabbing players as they walked to the bus in a cordoned-off area, which made the experience even more bothersome.
I preferred going to the actual event rinks for rare morning skates. Once, practically by myself in the stands early in the Games, I watched Jaromír Jágr and half of the Czech men’s team play a game of four-on-four shinny inside the blueline before their first practice. The skill, the movement, the dangling were breathtaking: smile-out-loud entertainment.
Interviews after practice and more formally after games at the Espo’ and at Palasport took place in an area called the “mixed zone.” This is standard operating procedure at the Olympic Games and at International Ice Hockey Federation events. The players leave the ice and, before they get to their dressing room, have to walk down a long corridor of sorts, with a wall on one side and a f
limsy rope or short fence on the other, separating the players from the throng of media. The luxuries of hiding after a bad game or ducking out a side door to avoid a writer or TV cameras — moves made by more than a few NHL players during the regular season — aren’t allowed here. Blowing off the media at the Olympics meant having to walk with your head down, running the gauntlet of the mixed zone past a couple hundred reporters and cameras, for all to see. It happened very rarely. Players always stopped and at least talked in their native tongue to reporters from their home country.
As the Games moved along, it was rather evident this wasn’t going to be Canada’s or the USA’s year in the marquee event, men’s ice hockey. Canada took care of business early on, winning their first two preliminary-round games against host Italy 7–2 and Germany 5–1.
But after a day off, Team Canada got tripped up. The Swiss, behind Carolina Hurricanes goalie Martin Gerber’s forty-nine saves, shut out the Canadians 2–0 at the Esposizioni. Paul DiPietro was the other hero, scoring both goals for Switzerland, his second on a two-man advantage in the second period. That was it. Head coach Ralph Krueger smiled on the Swiss bench, his team winning with only eighteen shots on goal. It was pretty simple: Gerber had stood on his head.
Canada responded by losing to Finland the very next day by the exact same score. Instead of Martin Brodeur in net, it was Roberto Luongo who took the loss. The Finns beating Canada wasn’t exactly a surprise. Teemu Selänne, who finished as the tournament’s leading scorer, and Saku Koivu, who finished second, took advantage of their team’s speed on the big ice to frustrate the Canadians. Selänne had the game winner in the first.
Canada, who chose not to name eighteen-year-old NHL rookie Sidney Crosby to the roster, finished the
prelims by beating the Czech Republic 3–2, enough to earn them the third seed entering the win-or-go-home quarterfinals.
