Kilimanjaro, nicknamed the Roof of Africa, stands 19,341 feet high
Known as “The Roof of Africa,” Mount Kilimanjaro was often identified from a distance by a cone of snow on the summit. The 19,341-foot peak is the tallest mountain on the African continent, but its snow and glaciers are disappearing, changes blamed on global warming.
A dormant volcano, Kilimanjaro is located in Tanzania. While impressive in height and scope, Kilimanjaro can be one of the easiest of the Seven Summits to ascend. That is because the weather is generally benign and there are no crevasses or avalanche dangers. The altitude represents the significant challenge.
The origin of the name Kilimanjaro is murky. Those who studied the matter well over a century ago attribute the label to words in native languages such as Swahili, essentially translated as “great mountain,” “white mountain,” or “mountain of caravans.”
Kilimanjaro is one of the best-known mountains in the world and it is visually arresting from a distance. It stands high, and, if not quite alone, stands out individually against the skyline.
Recorded history does not explain when Kilimanjaro first became known to Africans, but by 1860, explorers had identified it. The first ascent of the mountain recorded by Europeans took place in 1889. German geographer Hans Meyer and Austrian mountaineer Ludwig Purtscheller were credited with this pioneering climb. Purtscheller was a renowned climber for his era who took his greatest pleasure from route finding in the hills.
There had been numerous attempts to climb Kilimanjaro during the intervening thirty-year period between its recognition in the West and the Meyer-Purtscheller ascent. Some of those attempts were repelled by snow and some by altitude. The actual climbing route up Kilimanjaro that has been popularized is not terribly demanding. The challenges in no way resemble the difficulties presented by Mount Everest or Denali. The trail can generally be covered in a few days and it rates as no more than a strenuous hike. The main caveat for the climber, as is the case on many mountains that stand more than 10,000 feet high, is acclimating before pushing up too high.
The success rate is around sixty-five percent, but reports of altitude sickness are quite common amongst those who did not sufficiently train or rushed their climbs. The majority of people who die trying to climb the mountain suffer from some kind of altitude illness, although some have perished from pneumonia.
In August of 2014, a Swiss-Ecuadorian man named Karl Egloff actually ran up to the summit of Kilimanjaro and back to base camp in six hours and forty-two minutes to set a speed record. The oldest person to the summit was eighty-six years old. A man pushing a wheelchair has also reached the top. A Nepali friend of Vern Tejas’ climbed it going backwards a few years ago.
Tanzania, which borders Kenya, is at the heart of some of the world’s most fantastic wildlife viewing. Those two nations feature several game preserves and the opportunity to sign up for the additional excitement of taking wildlife photo safaris in conjunction with Kilimanjaro climbs. For the most part, hikers and climbers do not cross paths with the big game animals of Africa while on Kilimanjaro.
However, nearby opportunities abound to see elephants, lions, Cape buffalo, zebras, rhinos, warthogs, wildebeest, impala, leopard, Greater Kudu and others.
Kilimanjaro has also been featured in popular culture. The book, The Snow of Kilimanjaro, written by Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, is famous worldwide. The mountain can be seen on film in The Lion King.
Vern Tejas has made the journey to Africa a dozen times and has climbed to Kilimanjaro’s summit seventeen times.
The first time I went to Africa, I flew to Nairobi, the capital of the Kenya, on my own and took a bus to Moshi, the closest community to Kilimanjaro. This was not for a guided trip; I was doing Kilimanjaro on my own.
You have to cross the border between the countries and sometimes that can be tense and other times it is easy. Basically, the best thing to do is keep your head down and keep shuffling. Do not get into debates with the guards. They can turn you away if they feel like it, and they’re carrying guns.
There is a lot of weird action at the border. Some residents make their living by hanging out there trying to hustle wealthy foreigners. They try to sell beads, beads, and more beads, and anything else that they think you might like.
I made my way to the YMCA in Moshi and asked around to see if anyone was doing a climb of Kilimanjaro. There are local guides. In fact, you have to hire local guides. That’s part of the local economy.
My motivation at the time was to climb Kilimanjaro as the sixth of my Seven Summits. I was on my way to Everest that spring to complete the Seven Summits, and I wanted to get Kilimanjaro done beforehand. I was looking for the cheapest trip I could attach myself to, and I think it only cost me a couple of hundred dollars to join up with a bunch of backpackers. I was pretty acclimated, but I wanted to do the climb quickly, not spread it out over many days with camping in the designated huts. By then, the early 1990s, I was doing this sort of thing for a living so I was pretty much always acclimated from going from one mountain to another. Still, if I was going to climb it fast, I knew it was going to hurt. I had my pressure breathing techniques and a rest-step pace.
I also wanted to fly off the summit with my paraglider. I was crazy, because it is illegal to paraglide off Kilimanjaro. If you get caught, you get punished. You can get put in prison and fined. Part of the fine goes to the person who caught you so there is incentive for them to turn you in. Despite the appeal of the flight itself, it was not the best idea I ever had.
Climbing Kilimanjaro does not demand the time investment of an Everest or a Denali. Guided trips only take a few days. There are obvious designated camps for cooking and spending a couple of nights. There is a welcoming hut system where groups sleep. The climbers tote their sleeping bags up and spread them out on bunk beds. They are good resting places, but they are not heated. They are stopovers. The group turnover is pretty swift. Your group might hang for five hours, but there is always someone coming behind you that needs some rest, too.
Roughly 30,000 people a year try to reach the summit of Kilimanjaro. About two-thirds of them make it. The hut system is an aid. There are half a dozen available routes to choose from, some taking a little longer, some steeper. One popular trail is the Marangu Route. Typically, the climbers reach the Kibo Huts at about 15,500 feet, eat dinner, go to sleep, and wake up to depart at about 1:30 a.m. If they are lucky as they climb the route, the sky will feature a full moon and stars, and they might not have to keep a head lamp lit. The goal is to reach the top by sunrise, early in the morning, and gaze out at the spectacular scenery from the roof of the continent.
There are various well-known spots on Kilimanjaro: landmarks, much like on Denali, which have had prominent spots named. One place near the true summit is Stella Point. There are signs there informing climbers that the mountain is a World Heritage Site. There is also Kibo Point, Gilman’s Point, and Uhuru Peak. Uhuru is the highest summit on the Kibo volcano crater rim.
Uhuru is Swahili for freedom. When Kenyans and Tanzanians sought to remove themselves from European influence, “Uhuru” was the rebels’ battle cry. It was the most powerful and symbolic word in their struggles for independence through the 1950s and into the early 1960s.
My game plan to paraglide kind of ran up against the standing bounty for the locals to turn you in. People were wondering why I was carrying a conspicuously bigger backpack. Everybody else was carrying little daypacks. My pack was much bigger. My story was that, since I was training to climb Mount Everest, my pack was full of rocks. I needed the extra weight for the workout. I actually reached the point on the climb where I could carry the pack balanced on my head the way that the porters carried the supplies. I got to the point where I could hold the balance for forty-five minutes to an hour without even touching the pack with my hands. Looking back on it, it was definitely goofy.
Carrying the pack on my head was just an idle activity, giving me something to think about as I hiked up the trail. I didn’t have any responsibility to clients on this trip. There were a couple of Europeans on the trek, but they were feeling the altitude much more than I was. By the time we got to the Kibo hut, one of them was puking. He did not respond to the call to get up and go to the summit. The others did. We reached Gilman’s Point and then Stella Point. When we got that high, some of the guides started asking me why I was carrying such a big pack on summit day. I kept telling them it was rocks for my training, but they started going, “Yeah, right.”
The local guides got after me. They didn’t believe me. The porters do not speak much English, and they weren’t really paying much attention. The local guides are the ones who will get fined if you do anything wrong. They definitely didn’t trust me and I didn’t know what was going to happen. When we hit Stella Point I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I ran behind a ridge and I stashed the paraglider there and did put rocks in the pack. I had a feeling I might be searched.
I rejoined the group, put the pack on my head and went to the summit with everybody. Everyone congratulated everyone. We had hugs and kisses and the guides asked, “What’s in the pack?” I said, “Rocks.” They still didn’t believe me and said, “Show us.” I dumped out the rocks from the pack and they all said I was crazy. I just went “Yeah, yeah.” I also put the rocks back in the pack, because I knew when we got back to Stella Point I was going to have to do something to pick up the paraglider. But if I said I needed to go to the bathroom again, the guides would be really suspicious.
One thing about Kilimanjaro, once you reach the summit, they hustle you down as quickly as possible. They were in no mood for stops for anything. We just kept descending past certain points, including Stella. We zoomed past Kibo, which is already below Stella, and zipped down to the next hut. Most guides stop at one point to give people a rest because summit day is a long day. You get up in the middle of the night, climb up, and then descend. Normally, they pause at a hut to let people take a nap. But these guys were just pushing us. I’m thinking, “What am I going to do? I left my glider up there.” That thing was expensive. It was worth a couple of thousand bucks, and I was a poor mountain guide.
Finally, when we stopped and were tucked into bed for a rest in a hut, I opened the window, jumped out, and ran all of the way back to Stella Point in the dark. I grabbed the paraglider and was going to fly off then and there, but there were too many clouds. The most dangerous thing about paragliding is any lack of self-control. You want to fly whenever you can, but if you allow yourself to fly in the wrong conditions, it can be very dangerous. It takes a certain amount of self-control.
It was the middle of the night, I was away from my local guides, and I had my paraglider back, but I realized it just wasn’t safe enough. I had tears in my eyes when I put the glider back in my pack. It was 2 a.m. and I was heading down.
But guess what? Here came another group climbing up to make their morning sunset summit. I couldn’t let them see me because there was no explanation for me being there alone. They could hear me coming down in the scree. I’m hustling along. They were in a ravine and my choice was to either go down past them, or go off trail and try a different direction I hoped would let me reunite with the trail below them. I could hear them coming up. They were investigating because of the noise I made on the gravel scree. I could see the lights of their head lamps bouncing up toward me in the dark.
They were going up, so it was harder for them. I had gravity on my side. I had the ability to move quicker, even though they were hardened Kilimanjaro guides. Because I was going downhill, I was faster. Probably about fifty feet before they were going to intercept me, I bailed out to the left. I chose the left because they were coming up from the ravine from the right. They had clients, so they couldn’t really run off in any direction. They couldn’t abandon them and roam too far. Even if they want whatever reward money is being offered, they can’t leave the group behind.
They come running up the hill, and I could hear them yelling at me to stop. That was about as far as they could go because they couldn’t skip out on the clients. I head left for freedom and dash all of the way back down. Going back up to Stella Point meant I had pretty much climbed Kilimanjaro twice in one day. I got back to the hut and climbed in the window about thirty minutes before dawn. Before you know it, the guides are knocking on the door and shouting “Breakfast is ready!”
I put on an act, giving a big yawn and stretching like I’ve slept real well. But I was exhausted. We went all of the way down to the base and out the gate of Kilimanjaro National Park. I definitely put out a lot of energy and made things tough on myself. I didn’t get to fly, but I didn’t get caught. I did climb the mountain for my first time.
Many times since, I have returned to Kilimanjaro and climbed it again and again, but I have still never flown off with a paraglider. It is still illegal. Actually, it is illegal because of me. In 1988, when I climbed Denali in winter, I took a kite with me. I was planning to fly. The weather was a whiteout, very poor flying conditions, and windy. So to fly was a death wish. I left my glider on Denali. Later that year during the guiding season I climbed it three more times. Each time I took the paraglider to the top with me and every time the weather was bad. I brought it farther down the mountain and parked it, hid it, again. I left it cached on the mountain. That wasn’t legal either, but nobody was looking for it.
In 1989, I was invited on a University of Alaska trip to re-measure the mountain. A professor of engineering there, who taught a surveying course, organized the group. They asked me to join, and I said I would be part of it if I could fly off. The National Park Service thought I was getting paid to guide, but I wasn’t. The only thing the group was paying for was the food and transportation, but they were doing that for everyone who was part of the team. My tradeoff instead of being paid as a mountain guide was to be able to paraglide off the summit to the Football Field at 19,000 feet as a test. Back to the guide-to-glide program.
I didn’t know how the air would react with the foil. The air density was half as much as it was at sea level, so everything can happen twice as fast. It means you take off twice as fast, land twice as fast, and have to think twice as fast with the half the amount of oxygen you usually have. That’s not a great situation, but I did it. I did maybe a 700-foot vertical flight and learned it was possible. I had a good flight. After I stowed the paraglider back in my pack, I ran back to the summit to make the big jump. But the professor was showing signs of altitude sickness and I could not let him descend on his own. I roped up to him, slung the paraglider on my back, and, with a sad heart, left with him. So I did not fly from the summit, not taking the big leap I had always envisioned. I took only a small flight.
We dropped down to high camp above 18,200 feet, where the professor recovered. We stayed there because the plan was to run two state-of-the-art GPS receivers on batteries for four hours until they died and then return the next day with fresh batteries to do it all again.
The others asked me if I flew, and I said I had. It was not the biggest flight in the world, but I had achieved my goal of flying off the top. They said they missed it and asked if I could do another flight. I told them if they carried my gear down to the 14,200-foot camp, I would do another flight from 17,200 to 14,200. They were totally on board.
All kinds of people saw my second flight. They saw me launch from 17,200 and land at the 14,200 in a special spot. The spot was marked by wands, and it seemed like a safe place. Boom! I landed right in the middle of this landing zone. As I was folding up the paraglider I saw a sign reading, “Water Supply of National Park Service. Do Not Disturb.” Right where I had just landed. They had a regulation that said you can’t land in the Park. They meant airplanes. It did not say anything about landing a paraglider. However, the next year the regulation was amended to include paragliders.
Unbeknownst to a lot of people, national parks all over the world talk to each other. At Kilimanjaro, when they found it was illegal in the United States, the park service there decided to do the same thing. They followed the Americans’ lead from Denali, which was all because of me. So I played a big part in making it illegal on Kilimanjaro without realizing it. This all came out when I was speaking with the superintendent of Tanzania’s national parks seeking direct permission to fly off Kilimanjaro.
He said, “No. Sorry. Can’t make exceptions.” That said, they did make an exception a few years ago. They did grant permission, although the paragliders faced such bad weather that they did not pull it off.
I figured the story would continue indefinitely, but surprisingly park officials may have changed their minds now to allow paragliding on Kilimanjaro. If so, Africa, here I come!
Kilimanjaro is an annual stop for me, anyway. I have climbed with guided groups, by myself, and even completed a speed ascent. The one trip that sticks in my mind the most was when one of my former Everest climbers wanted to take his whole family to climb Kilimanjaro in 2007. When I say whole family, we had sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds and extended family. There were probably about a dozen people climbing.
We were having a great time until we got to high camp. The day we moved up high, a huge storm rolled in. It raged all night and put climbers’ summit tries on hold. That meant high camp was overloaded with people who had not gone up the day before as scheduled. The whole system works on people cycling through. Instead, we got all clogged up. Even worse, we began hearing stories. One porter died of hypothermia because of the ice storm and another porter slipped on the ice, hit his head on a rock, and died from a concussion. All of a sudden, this was not as much fun.
So many people congregated at this hut that we had to move to an even higher camp known as Kosovo where the porters had stopped. When we got there, all of the porters who were supposed to be putting up the tents were just sitting there, huddled together, and there was no shelter ready. I said, “Get me a tent. You, you, you, give me a hand.” It was very windy. We started setting up the tents as fast as we could and throwing cold, wet, miserable family members into them as well as the porters, who were freezing. They were hypothermic. We had to get them out of the elements, as well as hold down the tents. Everybody’s body warmth helped each other.
It was postman weather: sleet, hail, rain, and snow. And it was going postal on us. Meanwhile, my friend’s wife got really cold and was shivering uncontrollably. He thought he was going to lose her, so in the morning, when everything had settled down, we did not go to the summit. We could have spent another day there resting and recuperating and gone the following night, but he said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” I had wanted them to have an enjoyable trip, but he was worried about losing family members. I said, “Man, you’re right. Let’s go.” That was one of my more memorable trips on Kilimanjaro, but not for the best of reasons. We had to turn back on what normally is one of the most straightforward of mountains. I had never done a family outing before.
Remarkably, a couple of years later, the same friend came back with me to climb Aconcagua with two of the sons who had been with him on Kilimanjaro, and we got blasted by the weather there, too. Same scenario. We ran, just got the hell out of there. After that he gave up on the family trips, I think. He is in his sixties now and is finding other things to do that did not put his family at as much risk.
Usually, Kilimanjaro is a great introductory mountain in terms of getting up high in a famous place without too much hassle and with no technical climbing. It has also become easier to reach with flights over the years. You can fly direct from New York to Amsterdam and then to Kilimanjaro International Airport, as they call it. It leaves you between Moshi and Arusha, two nearby cities.
One of the spectacular bonus parts of going to Kilimanjaro is being able to take a wildlife safari. Alaska is great that way, too, of course. When I first saw a moose in Alaska, I saw it from behind, just its hindquarters sticking out of a bush, and I said, “I didn’t know they had wild horses in Alaska.” Then his head came up.
The Serengeti in Africa is one of the most remarkable places on earth. There’s nothing that compares to it in terms of seeing a wide variety and volume of animals.
Just hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of wildebeest. Animals from the smallest to the largest on earth, from little shrews and other itsy bitsy things to giraffes, zebras, and elephants, to all of the predators in between. Despite all of my time spent in Alaska, Africa is the wildest place I’ve ever been. There’s nothing that compares to it. It’s you that it’s in the cage with wheels on it driving around to see them.
The animals are just out there running around doing their thing, and it’s pretty impressive to watch. One time, we drove up on a very big male lion mating just five feet away. That was pretty up close and personal, and it is still an amazing memory. Just the rawness of it was impressive. When they finished mating, she turned around, growled, and tried to hit him with her massive paw. Wow. OK. That is what life is all about.
Elephants are so mega. They are so big you think they shouldn’t even exist on earth. I’ve been in the Serengeti, the Masai Mara National Game Preserve, and seen hundreds of thousands of animals, and this incredibly cool experience was part of my job. I have managed to pull off about a half dozen safaris as a byproduct of Kilimanjaro climbs. If I go, I don’t even have to interpret, because the driver-guides speak perfect English. I merely rebroadcast what the driver-guides say to my clients. I learn a lot this way.
Such amazing things have been spotted on those drives, from mating lions to fighting giraffes. You would not believe how nasty those guys can get. You know those little prongs on their heads? Those are battering rams. They swing them. They swing their whole heads and collide with their opponents’ chests. It all seems in slow motion because there is like seventeen feet of extension. The other guy is going, “Oh, damn, here it comes.” Their necks alone must weigh 300 or 400 pounds. When they smack into the other guy you can hear a thump. It has got to bruise the other animal. Then the other guy does it. They are jousting for mates. It’s one of the most bizarre acts of fighting I’ve ever seen.
When I say it’s like slow motion, it may take ten seconds to unfold. Sometimes the recipient will raise his leg in anticipation and try to step down over the other giraffe’s head and pin him. Once the first guy gets going, he can’t stop. The other guy wins if he pins the first giraffe’s head. It’s like, “OK, I’m smarter. I’m stronger. I’m faster.” It’s something to be experienced. When giraffes run, it may seem like slow motion, but they are hoofing it. They’re traveling ten yards in a step, moving at thirty miles per hour.
Hippos and Cape buffalo are very dangerous to people. So are crocodiles. Crocs take like 1,000 people a year. Most of them are in small communities, so not everybody hears about it. Crocodiles know other animals have to obtain water. They’ve been on the job for sixty million years doing the same thing. They go, “I’ll just stay here by the waterhole and look like a log. Something will come down to drink. I will eat it.”
The hippos are very territorial and surprisingly nimble. Once they open their mouth, you’re not long for this world. They don’t eat you, they just crush you, which is small consolation. They’ve got these massive, sixteen-inch saber teeth, and they make a deep impression when they clamp down, to say the least. They’re bad news, and very aggressive. I suspect that is from coping with crocodiles for eons. They do not want you nearby. Even crocs avoid them.
Hippopotami are dangerous animals if they don’t want you around. But if they don’t really know you are there, no big deal. Different story if they see you in the water. They flip canoes over. They’ll crunch a swimmer. I wouldn’t want to go swimming anywhere in Africa, to tell you the truth. If it’s not the big things that kill you, the little things will. No thanks. Pass. I have swum in Africa, but only in a hotel pool. That’s it. The pool was safe from hippos.
Leopards are hard to see. I saw one in a tree lounging around. It wasn’t going anywhere. It must have just eaten. Leopards will ambush a hunter. Sometimes you see profiles of one, but it was pretty cool to see this one hanging out in a tree. Baboons hate them. They eat baboons. But if there is a troupe of baboons around, they can actually kill the leopard. Get ten of them together biting—and they have good-sized teeth—the leopard is going down.
Cape buffalo look leathery and tough, and they are. It has been said they always look mad, as if you owe them money. They are, and you do! Buffalo have terrible eyesight, which makes them real edgy. They attack first and ask questions later. Anything that moves is a target. Good to know when one confronts you at close range. Don’t move, even if your mind is screaming “Run!” They definitely seem left over from a prior age.
Mostly, I have not faced threats from animals, but I was charged by an elephant once while riding in a Land Rover. Unfortunately, we were trying to out-run him in reverse. We were very surprised by how quickly the elephant could move. The same bull flipped a vehicle the day before. Our driver-guide’s quick reflexes allowed us to get away.
I know of people who reached up while rock climbing and grabbed hold of a snake. Some of the smaller animals, rodents or birds, can be camp robbers stealing your food. Once, all we were left with was Brussels sprouts. But most of the mountaineering for Kilimanjaro takes place above tree line, and therefore above most animals.
Most of the time when you’re on Kilimanjaro, the weather does not interfere. The extreme weather that my friend and his family ran into is not common. But it is a reminder when you are on a mountain, above 18,000 feet, or even at 15,000, anything can happen. People should never underestimate mountains. Hypothermia has probably killed more people than anything else in the mountains, and you don’t need a blizzard with fifty miles per hour winds to have that problem. Falls occur, but that can happen at sea level. You get above tree line, and you’re in weather. There is no place to hide then, even on 7,000-foot Kosciuszko, it can ruin your day. At 19,000 feet, near the summit of Kilimanjaro, if it starts to sleet, it can be serious stuff. When the wet sticks to you and freezes on you, that can bring down the strongest of porters or the hardiest of mountaineers. You’ve got be prepared with warm, water-resistant, wind-resistant clothing.
On Kilimanjaro, you pass through different climate zones. Near the bottom, on the beginning of the hike, you pass from jungle to rain forest, to cloud forest, as they call it, so you actually work yourself up to where it’s raining much of the time. There is moss growing on every tree and the ferns are fifteen feet tall. Then, when you get above the clouds, things start drying out. You get giant heather and smaller, bushier plants. Then you’re in a sub-Alpine zone. It’s more like tundra with short shrubs and small grasses. Above that it is so dry it’s a desert. They say on Kilimanjaro you can see all of earth’s major environmental zones. You see jungle, forest, bushland, tundra, desert, and near the top it’s Arctic, with snow and ice.
I enjoy the contrast. I like the changes. There can be a lot of mud on the trail. Welcome to Africa. It can be slippery and quite nasty down low. I try to book it through the rain forest section quite quickly. You can go through in one day. Conditions improve the higher you get.
With the culture and the wildlife, as well as the height of the mountain, Kilimanjaro is one of the most exotic trips you can take. You get a hiking challenge, but not the mountaineering challenge, because the porters carry the supplies. Clients only carry fifteen-pound packs. You cannot climb Kilimanjaro without a local guide, and the local guide will not take you without the porters. It is about a five-to-one ratio, one climber, and five staff. It creates a lot of jobs. It is good for the economy, but it can also create the false impression that mountaineering is just a walk in the park. It is there, but if the same climber goes to Denali and expects the same thing, with all of that hauling help, they are going to be surprised.
If they got spoiled on Kilimanjaro, they had to learn quickly that other mountains were going to be harder, and they were going to be expected to work harder on the climbs. They may come away from Kilimanjaro thinking, “This is great! This is easy! I love it!” And as a guide on Elbrus you go, “OK. Let’s see if you’re ready for the next phase.” That means you carry a little more stuff. There’s a little more risk involved. There’s more commitment to the mountain. On Denali you are fully responsible for the movement of your gear and the safety is on you. In the process of climbing the Seven Summits, a transformation takes places as the effort required to reach the top gets progressively harder. I watch some of the people trying to climb the Seven Summits advance from beginners who just like a hike in the park to people intrigued with the experience who are willing to work very hard to take on more difficult challenges. Everest may be a much tougher climb, but your stuff is pretty much being carried by Sherpas like Kilimanjaro. Of course, Everest is like ten times more difficult than Kilimanjaro. To me, the main obstacle on Everest is the lack of oxygen. You also have much more snow and ice than Kilimanjaro, too.
You get lots of people on Kilimanjaro. Going to 19,000 feet is a big deal, but there is a major difference in going to 29,000 feet. They get 25,000 people a year climbing Kilimanjaro. Due to the two rainy seasons, the majority of folks climb during the two dry seasons. You end up with hundreds of people on the mountain at the same time during the height of the season. That is way too many really. It’s never going to be a solitary experience that I enjoy. Why wouldn’t you want to be on the summit at sunrise with 300 of your closest friends?
On one trip to Africa, after I had climbed Kilimanjaro and was acclimated, me being a self-competitive type guy, I wanted to challenge myself. I decided I wanted to climb the second highest mountain in Africa. This was about ten years ago. It is a day’s worth of driving to Mount Kenya, where the summit is 17,057 feet above sea level.
I hired a local guide who knew the route. We got up in the dark, put on a climbing harness and ropes and headed for the rock. It involved twenty-one pitches of very reasonable rock climbing. The climb is delightful, just 5.7 or 5.8 in rating, easy scrambling. It was pitch after pitch. We reached the top and tagged the summit and took a photo and then retreated, racing the dark. It was a very long day, dark to dark.
Being acclimated made the whole thing better for me. My guide and I were well-matched, so we could keep moving. I was pleased to top out on that peak in grand weather, with good company, in good conditions. It made for a very nice experience. We did not see anyone else during the climb. Mount Kenya is barely climbed compared to Kilimanjaro. It is like Mount Foraker in the Alaska Range compared to Denali. About 1,500 people a year might try Denali, and ten will go to Foraker.
Other things the authorities do not appreciate on Kilimanjaro are people who want to do solos or who want to speed climb. I returned from Kenya to Kilimanjaro to visit with their park service. There is no unguided climbing on Kilimanjaro. I had to hire a guide who said he wanted to do it in one day like me, but also had to pay the cost of a week’s worth of garbage removal and a week’s worth of porter services even though neither was involved.
So I paid for a week’s services even though I knew I was going to climb it round-trip in less than a day. The entrance gate is at around 6,000 feet and you’re going to 19,300 feet. At 3 a.m. I put on a head lamp and told the guide, whom I had climbed with before, how we were going to go fast. He said, “I can do this in a day.” I said, “Great, because we’re going to be moving. Please keep up.” He said, “Yeah, right.” As the day wore on, he kept falling behind. Twice I left him for twenty minutes at a time. After I taught him the pressure breathing, we were able to stay together. That was important because we had to pass a ranger station and I wasn’t supposed to be alone.
I made one mistake before we started. I ate Indian food that night for dinner hours before we started and the first thing I did when I put on the boots at 3 a.m. was run to the outhouse. I got sick. The choice of food was not such a good one for me. I blew my brains out in the outhouse before we started. That haunted me for the rest of the day. If I got ahead of the guide, I ran into the bushes. Not feeling so great after my bout with the bad Indian food made it harder to snack. Things were going out as fast as they were going in.
We reached the summit in between eight and nine hours and came right down. I got really tired on the way down. Overall, I was out around fifteen hours and forty minutes for the whole thing. You are going up 13,000 feet and coming down 13,000 feet. That’s 26,000 feet round trip. You might not think about it at first, but that’s pretty hard on your knees.
On the route we took, it would probably ordinarily be five days to the summit. Most people do not take the Umbwe route. It’s very direct, but not as gentle an ascent. We reached the summit about noon and returned to the road just after nightfall. It was a very busy day. We came down a different route that I had been on several times, so I knew where I was at when it was getting dark. At that point, the guide fell far behind me, met some friends, and I think smoked a doobie. He fell far behind me, but I was close to the exit gate.
I was past the last checkpoint and I knew if I checked out without him they would understand. The climb was pretty much over. My girlfriend at the time was able to convince the park people to let her meet me on the road, so she came up a little ways. Even then, I still felt sick and had to stop at outhouse on the way out.
It was not a record time, and I was not even thinking about a record time. Since then, the fastest time up and down Kilimanjaro has been lowered to below six hours. One of my rules is that I do not run, and people who are setting those kinds of records are running for at least part of the climb.
One reason I wouldn’t run is that I suffered a broken ankle on a rock climb years earlier and I wasn’t really able to run. I figure that if you’re striding out without damage, you will last longer. I feel like I can move reasonably fast without the jarring of running. Now I am just blown away by how fast some people can go in the mountains.
The first time I ever thought about going up a mountain as fast as I could was on my solo of Mount Vinson in Antarctica in 1988. It’s a fairly benign mountain by the standard way. I had just done the route, so I knew where there were crevasses. From my perspective, there was nothing major to be concerned about. I also had climbers I had to get back to rather swiftly. I have done all of the Seven Summits each in less than a day except for Mount Everest. Guiding on Mount Everest, I can’t do that. I have clients to watch over. I would like to try to do it in a day. It has been done. I know several people who have done it in less than twenty-four hours. I think I could, too.
Opportunity, good conditions, being in position, being fit, and being acclimated all are critical components. You can’t even think of a speed climb up any of these mountains without those elements in your favor. When I tried Kilimanjaro for speed, I had recently climbed it, and gone over and climbed Mount Kenya, which is also quite high. I was prepared by the first two climbs.
You can try those things without being as acclimated, but it’s a different game with far more risk. You’re going to hurt yourself trying to go fast while not acclimated. I’ve learned a few things from all of my experience on the Seven Summits. Oxygen is really good and more is better. Technique, pressure breathing, taking Diamox, using rest steps, all of it helps. If you’re smart you use all of those things. When I’m guiding I am all about pace for the group and maintaining a margin of safety. When I am on vacation, not guiding, I can do anything I want. That’s when I pick up the pace. I move quickly, efficiently and that is the freedom of the hills to me. I am trying to make fluid movements through a challenging place to the best of my abilities and within my limits. One of the most pleasant experiences in life is to move efficiently and at a fast pace through a harsh environment.