The climb/hike itself starts very gently. The first day is only a
half day, but you still make it 11 kilometers into the park. Ruwenzori
has the reputation for being the rainiest and messiest, but that wasn't
the experience we had. Ruwenzori rained on me for one afternoon during
an entire week. Kilimanjaro rained on us, and heavily, at least once a
day. We made it about two hours into the trail before the skies opened
up on us and dumped on us for the rest of the hike. I was at least
warned by a friend who'd done the mountain before that the single most
important thing I could bring on the mountain with me was good rain
gear. She was right.
The first leg of the journey is
entirely below the tree line in a fairly dense tropical forest. The
beginning of the hike has similar foliage to Ruwenzori and the same
kinds of monkeys crash through the trees above your head as you walk
by. The trail is so well maintained and built it could be considered
manicured. There are steps. It's a pretty gentle introduction to the
mountain. As you'd expect, campgrounds on Kilimanjaro are huge. Camp
the first night, though, doesn't feel huge because it's still in the
tropical forest portion of the hike, so everyone is scattered throughout
the forest and separated by dense tree stands. It doesn't feel
crowded, though you can still hear everyone talking and milling around
at night. Like other mountains, there are huts built in the
campgrounds. Unlike other mountains, they're strictly for park ranger
use only. Apparently, there are huge tourist huts on the Marangu route,
the easiest and most popular on the mountain. Tent camping is nice,
and it feels a little less... weird when you're doing a mountain.
Wetter, though, and it's more difficult to spread everything that needs
to dry at the end of a wet day out. We managed, though. We did have to
spread out clothing and our bedding every day, though, because it kept
getting wet, even with rain covers for our bags and strategic placements
of things within our bags to keep the most important the driest.
The
second day on the mountain is short, but it's much steeper than the
first, with rocky trails and the occasional scramble. Marie did not
enjoy it. It's still only a Class 2 trail and takes about 4 hours to
complete. Everyone does their best to get up early and get it done by
lunch time so that they can avoid the regular afternoon rains. We made
it into camp literally about five minutes before the rain started and
piled ourselves and all of our stuff into the tent before the heavens
opened. It gave us a good opportunity to read for a while. A few hours
later, after the rains cleared up, we took a short "acclimation" (time
killing) hike up to the Shira Cave and a small, rocky prominence behind
it in the late afternoon. Apparently, until 1977, porters and African
guides were forced to sleep in the cave, rather than tents like the
climbers. Now, people boulder the cave. Another weird colonial
holdover: the nicer toilets are still marked "TOURIST TOILETS", though
everyone poops in them a in a free, equal, and uninhibited manner.
When
the weather cleared in the morning of the third day, we finally got to
see the summit of the mountain. Being by far the tallest mountain in
Africa (2,300' taller than Mt. Kenya), its snow cover is the most
striking and impressive. It's been severely reduced over the past
century and is estimated to only have about 30 years of life left
because of climate change, but the summit of the mountain is still
mostly covered in snow, despite the loss of most of its glacial cover.
It looks like a giant, white beacon glowing under the morning sun. It
also looked impossibly tall and far away, even though we knew we would
be standing on it in just over two days.
The second
camp is at the edge of the tree line, making most of the third day's
hike over scrubby and barren, rocky terrain. The third day is the main
acclimation day, taking you through a pass by a feature called the Lava
Tower (which is pretty much what it sounds like--climbers are a lot of
things, but we're not creative when it comes to naming things; there's a
bouldering spot in Texas that we call The Rocks) at about 15,000' and
then back down to an elevation only slightly higher than the start of
the day for sleep. Like Kenya and Ruwenzori, Kilimanjaro also has giant
lobelias, the unusual and huge plants unique to these high African
mountains. Ruwenzori has by far the most impressive and striking forest
of them, but Kilimanjaro has the largest ones. On Kilimanjaro, they
got up to twenty feet tall and had five bushy hydra heads leaning over
the trail. Otherwise, it's a pretty rocky and open climb. This one
takes all day and requires you to hike through the rain and sleet all
afternoon, which makes you pretty excited about reaching camp and
enjoying some hot tea, despite the stunning scenery. The camp at the
end of the day is the largest, because another trail converges with the
Machame route, depositing its hikers into the camp, as well.
After
this, people's itineraries really vary. Many people, especially those
coming from low-elevation areas far away, stop at the Karanga camp, only
a 3-hour hike from the third camp. Others walk six hours to Barafu,
the high camp that summit bids are generally launched from at 15,000'.
Some groups stay at Barafu for more than one night before attempting the
summit, taking short hikes partially up the mountain to acclimate. A
few will camp higher on the mountain by themselves to acclimate. We'd
chosen the short itinerary, so we walked directly to Barafu the
following day and the summit the "next" day. The hike to Barafu starts
out by scaling the Barranco Wall, which is a steep wall covered in
technical climbing, but has a couple of hikeable, Class 3/4 seams
splitting it up, making it accessible to everyone. For me, it was one
of the most fun parts of the hike because it was steep and required a
few exposed, scrambling moves over rock, which always puts a smile on my
face. After the wall, it's an up-and-down hike through several valleys
to reach whichever camp you're going to. We had lunch at Karanga camp
and waited out the heaviest portion of the afternoon sleet before
continuing on to Barafu.
Barafu is perched on a rocky
spine standing over a small valley, making it an awkwardly spread out
camp where people have crammed tents wherever there's room. The
outhouses are tiny and precariously perched on the edge of a cliff,
making for an interesting restroom approach in the middle of the night.
However...... Some of the groups that have sunk a lot of money into
the mountain and making it as comfortable as possible have porters carry
portable, private, sit-down toilets (as opposed to the squat
toilets/holes in the floor that the outhouses have--tourists
unaccustomed to them have erm poor aim) with them. At night, no one's
paying attention to their toilets' private sanctity anymore, so you can poach on them. Which we totally didn't. Not once. (Well, only once.)
"Spending
one night" at Barafu means getting to the camp in the early evening,
eating dinner, and sleeping for 2-3 hours before departing for the
summit at midnight. It reduces how much time you have to acclimate to
the mountain, and that's why I recommend selecting an itinerary that
lets you spend at least one full night at Barafu and/or one night
further up the mountain before attempting the summit. We got up bright
and late at 11:30 PM, had a snack, and started walking. This final
stretch of the ascent is by far the steepest. Between that and the
oxygen deprivation at altitude, it's pretty grueling. We maintained an
alright pace, but we had to take a lot of short stops and our footsteps
got increasingly small and timid as the hike wore on. It takes about
six hours on average (took us seven) to reach the rim of the volcano's
caldera, and another 45 minutes to reach the rim's highest point. The
last stretch had us taking slow, six-inch steps all the way,
transforming what would've been a 10-minute walk at sea level into one
that took nearly an hour. We were feeling pretty rancid and sluggish,
but we made it.
The most maddening thing about the hike is
that, at night when you can't see very far, you see what looks like one
final rock corner that you have to just get over before the land
flattens out about a dozen times. Approaching and pulling over each
only to find yet another again and again is pretty frustrating
sometimes, but on the way down, you can see the actual end of the hike
pretty much from the beginning.
The summit scenery is
hard to beat. A hanging glacier, the most impressive of all the
mountain glaciers I've seen in Africa, leans off of one side of the
summit, with the big, blocky remnants of others littering the caldera.
The sunrise and the ice turn the whole area into a mix of pink and light
aquamarine. The sun rises behind Mawenzi peak, a jagged and technical
subsidiary peak several kilometers off of Kibo (considered to have
sufficient separation from Kibo to be Africa's Third Seven Summit
peak, rather than Ruwenzori), the main summit of the mountain (with
Uhuru Peak being its highest point and Kilimanjaro's summit). Honestly,
after we reached the sign congratulating us on our summit, we took a
couple of pictures and started trudging back to a lower altitude to feel
better. Every time I had to stop and rest, someone would encourage me
by slapping me on the shoulder and saying "Good job!" It seemed to be
what everyone who was feeling alright did for everyone who wasn't so
much to encourage them to finish and to start getting down to an
elevation where they would feel better.
The descent doesn't take nearly as long as the ascent, since you're going downhill in daylight.
We were amazingly tired by the time we returned to camp during the last
part of the morning. We ate lunch and slept for an hour. It was
amazingly revitalizing, which was good, because we needed to hike
another four hours down the mountain to a low camp so we could exit on
time to make the bus back to Nairobi in the morning. It was at least a
gentle, downhill hike all the way, so it wasn't too difficult, even
though we were still kind of tired from summitting. We slept like
babies and got up at 5 the next morning to make the bus. We did. We
got home. We showered. We slept.
--Jeremy
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