Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Day 6 of 7

Kilimanjaro Climb (7 day Machame route) Day 6/7

This is it!!

From our Operator:

Around midnight (your guide will judge the time that is optimal for you based on your pace thus far) quit camp for the assault via Stella Point (5752m) to the summit. 

Tonight is very difficult - particularly the final 500m - and you’ll need to commit to fight for the summit. 

You will inevitably feel like giving up and going to sleep. This is normal and can be overcome with perseverance. When resting please ensure you only stand or sit and do not lie down or close your eyes. 

Please trust your guide; he is very adept at judging whether your condition will allow safe progress or whether you have succumbed to a potentially dangerous condition and to proceed will not be safe. 

Nausea and headaches are normal and around a quarter of climbers will vomit at or near Stella Point. While very uncomfortable, these are not symptoms that are indicative of being at risk, per se. The onset of cerebral and pulmonary oedema are marked by distinctive early warning symptoms that your guide is capable of identifying. 

Please maintain regular dialogue with him and frequently update him on how you are feeling.   When you reach Stella Point you will sit and rest. At this point the body often thinks you have finished your uphill fight and will be trying to coerce you into giving up and turning around. 

While you may genuinely believe that you have already exhausted your reserves in reaching this point, this is actually very unlikely to be so. 

Remember that you are only 143 vertical metres short of the summit, the journey from here is much less steep, and you have plenty of time for further pauses. If you do feel the need to give up at Stella Point please proceed towards the summit for just two minutes before making your final decision. 

In most cases this act of re-establishing momentum is enough to persuade the mind and body to co-operate with your intentions and you will ordinarily find hidden reserves for a final push, reserves that you were not aware you still had.  

Almost there!   

Keep your thoughts positive, as your thoughts become your words, 

Keep your words positive, as your words become your actions, 

Keep your actions positive; as your actions become your destiny you can do it!   

On the summit your guide will advise how much time you can spend there in consideration of your condition, your timings, and the weather. 



The brain does not function very intelligently at this altitude so please remember to take many photographs in all directions or you will probably regret not having done so at a later stage.   

From the summit you will descend to Stella Point and from here your guide may opt to switch left onto the loose scree, a departure from the ridge up which you ascended. 

On arrival at Barafu your tents will still be erected and ready for you to rest an hour or so before continuing the descent after some refreshments.   

From Barafu you will usually descend to Mweka Camp (3090m) for overnight. If your guide judges that a shorter day will benefit you and preserve sore knees and ankles, he may decide to stop short at Millennium Camp (3820m) instead.   

Distances on summit day 

Barafu to Stella Point: 3.3km 
Stella Point to Summit: 1.2km 
Summit to Barafu: 4.5km 
Barafu to Mweka Camp: 6.3km 

Total = 15.3km

THAT'S WHAT THE BROCHURE SAID, THIS IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENED:

Following on from my last post, we climbed up towards Stella Point, thinking it simply would never end. As with everything... eventually it did!


We reached Stella Point at around 6 am. We'd been hiking vertically for 6 1/2 hours in sub-zero temperatures with only about 10% of the oxygen I am used to breathing at sea-level. 

When I got there, I promptly laid myself on the ground, hoping to stay there for a while and rest. Our guides had to have been the best guides on the mountain that night. At Stella Point they hauled out plastic cups and a flask and produced warm, sweet tea! 

How awesome to be sitting at Stella Point, watching the sun come up with a cup of warm sweet tea!

We were only there for a few minutes. I was ready to go back down (been there... done that...!) but Marco said we had to keep going. Just start walking he said - just get moving... If I had any more energy, I may have thrown a tantrum because he obviously didn't understand just how tired I was feeling... (very selfish of me, I know!)

Anyway, he was right. We got up and kept going. Although the elevation from here was nothing like that last bit up to Stella Point, the exhaustion and lack of oxygen was really getting to me. I was now taking 5 steps forwards, break for 10 seconds, 5 steps forwards, break for 10... and so on.

I had to go slow, but no one was rushing me, so on and on we went. Those that had gone before and were on their way back down were wonderfully supportive: "You're nearly there" and "Not much further!"

We eventually make it to Uhuru Peak (5895m) at 07:10 am. When we eventually got there we were buoyed up with adrenalin! So happy to not be walking up-hill anymore was enough to make us both feel fantastic!! 

Oh, we'd told Ali to go on ahead as I was taking an age to get there. He waited at the top for us and we celebrated the achievement together!

By now the sun was up and our surroundings were just incredible! One good thing about taking a bit longer to reach the top is being able to see all this. Some other hikers got up and down so quickly that they did it all in the dark.

We didn't spend too much time up here, by now Marco was starting to feel nauseous from the altitude, so we started making our way down again.


Now it was our turn to tell those behind us "Not much further now" "Keep going; it's worth it!"


This photo (above) is looking into the crater from the rim at Uhuru Peak.

Here you can see the glaciers meeting the clouds.  One of the main reasons you summit overnight is that the ground is frozen on your way up making the ascent easier. With the sun up the ground starts to defrost and the fine sand is up in the air and makes your downhill journey fairly treacherous. With each step you slip-slide down and have to be careful not to fall on your ass... which happens frequently to everyone anyway.


What goes up, must come down. Although it took us 8 hours to reach the peak, it took us 3 1/2 hours to get back to Barafu base camp. It is very, very hot up here and by this point we were so tired that we couldn't even be bothered to take the very much needed sun cream out of our packs and put it on. We just wanted to get back, so burnt our hands (everything else was thankfully still covered up) for three hours while we painfully made our way back to the camp.

Please be warned about this stretch of the little adventure. At 10:00am we eventually made it back to camp. We were far too tired to be elated with our amazing achievement.

We were told that we had 1 hour to rest, get changed and pack our things. For safety reasons we had to continue our decent as soon as possible. We were still at 4600m and not out of the danger zone for AMS.

We took an hour and a half to rest up and get our things organised. We had a quick lunch and then we were on our way again. Our porters packed up our tents and quickly passed us as we made our way downhill.

Below - that's me and in the background that's where I had come from only 4 or 5 hours earlier.

With our relatively quick decent the terrain thankfully changed. In the end we decided that we weren't all to fond the alpine desert part. Hot and boring! (Remember by this point though that we're so exhausted we don't even have any enthusiasm left... that will come later again!)

So as tired as we were we, stumble into Millennium Camp. The boys were so happy to have arrived. Spoil-sport that I was I had to dampen their joy by informing them that this is a 'trick' camp and we won't be staying. They of course didn't believe me and went straight to our guide Rayson, who confirmed that this is a camp for hikers who do a different route or who are very late in coming down the mountain.

So, after a short break... we continued down what must, for me, be the worst part of this entire trip. For a further 3 hours went down a dried up river bed. This is no path. We're stepping down, on, over and around small rocks, big stones, some secure, others loose. 


Every single step required attention. Every jolt sent pain up my knees and every foot forward felt my toes bashing the inside of my shoes. It hurt like hell and didn't seem to want to end.

The worst I think was just the expectation that was set. When we asked "how much further" (in the nicest way possible way, of course) we were told 40 minutes. After an hour we said... "so; how much further" and we were told an hour. 

Either time keeping in East Africa is nonexistent or its in a whole new dimension that we haven't yet named.


In the end... we got there! At 4:00pm we stumbled into Mweke camp. Realising that we had been walking from 11:30pm the night before, with only one real break of 1h 30mins... It's not surprising that we had been a little moody!

For the last time, we came to our camp with the wonderful singing and celebrations of our guides and porters. 

After taking our packs off and after a well deserved break at camp and with oxygen levels starting to rise again (we were now at 3090m, from this morning's 5895m!), we started smiling too. Finally we could look back on the day and the day's wonderful achievement.

WE MADE IT!!

1 comment:

stuart black said...

Good luck. Nearly there. No fighting!!! My mum sends her love.

x