Kilimanjaro is a big pile of rocks. Or rather, a big pile of lava. I was surprised--though I shouldn't have been--at how the high rock-quotient translated into a low critter- and plant-quotient: not a whole lot grows on the upper slopes of that old volcano.
My trek took 5 days to ascend to the summit and 2 days to descend. I think it could have been managed relatively easily in 4 days up, but I will tell you that the company with which I booked my trek really, really discouraged me from doing a 6-day. After having now completed the adventure, I suspect that has to do with how deceptively accessible the summit is. There are a generous buttload of people attempting that mountain every day--hundreds on the way up on any given day with one tour provider or another (one must hire a guiding company to climb the mountain). My group had 14 climbers in it, and we were just one of 5 groups on our climbing schedule just from my touring company (and there were many other touring companies operating on the same schedule). I would estimate that 300 trekker per day attempt the summit, give or take 100. What that means is that there are a lot of unprepared, inexperienced folks giving it their best shot, and so the guiding operators try to nudge folks into a schedule that is less likely to end in either failure or medical difficulty.
Anyway, 5 days up was more than plenty, given that 4 of those 5 days involve walking around the mountain from the west side to the summit approach on the eastern slope. I actually found these 4 days a little...boring, with the exception of the Barranco Wall, a 1300-foot not-quite-cliff that must be climbed in order to get to the next camp. This stretch was, by far, my favorite part of the whole week on Kili. It's basically an unroped 5.3 up which everything must be hauled.
[Zoom in to see the line of tiny little people on the left side, making their slow zigzag up the face]
Look at these porters, carrying....you know, metal folding tables and 20-gallon jugs of water. Incredible.
Summit night begins at 11pm. Summiting consists of ascending 4000 vertical feet in 3 miles, with sand and loose shale underfoot. It was not too difficult, but it was not fun. The hardest thing for me was not having any sleep in me at the outset, which made the 3-4am stretch feel like profound physical regret. I was in the "fast group," and we made the first summit, Stella Point, at about 630am and the second, true summit, Uhuru Peak, at about 730am.
And yes: glaciers! Six glaciers on the top of that old volcano. I can't at this point remember all their names, but I was very happy to meet them all.
After sand-surfing back down that 4000-foot sandpile, it was another 16 miles to the mountain's base, over two days. Through a rainforest with monkeys and beautiful flowers and a proper dumping of rain.
I'm glad I did it, I'm pleased that it was not especially physically taxing for me. I was the only person in my climbing group that did not take Diamox, and my unaided oxygen levels were in the high 90s the entire trip, my resting heart rate 50-60. Those are pretty much the numbers I post at home, so altitude seems still to be a friend to my body.
Would I do it again? Probably not--it's just not scenic in the way that, say, the Everest region is. But I'm super happy to have had the chance to go up this big old volcano. And to have stayed on to safari--about which more in the next post.
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