The Altitude of Kibo Camp

Today it was cold and we woke up to a little dusting of snow.








I found today to be very strange in that we could see our final destination for most of the hike but it turned out to be much farther away then I would have guessed.


We would be hiking the Alpine Desert for 5 hours as we crossed the saddle and reached an elevation of 15,580 feet, which is really the base of the actual mountain. Yeah, the first 4 days were just getting up to the base of the mountain, and a mountain whose base is higher than most other mountains.


We watched Mawenzi become an ancient memory.




We moved forward, and to keep my mind off the fact that I was hiking, I started looking for good chutes and lines, that with a little more snow could prove to be skiable. I wonder what the porters would charge to carry up a pair of skis?






Because of the snow you are able to see the path we will be taking. It may look short but it is so big and so vast that there is actually a crashed plane in this picture just to the right of the trail, can you see it?


Here it is. They took out the engine because it was valuable, however everything else was left, well, except for the bodies which were also removed.






Our porters were approaching fast.






Finally we could see Kibo camp. If you look up the mountain a little right of the middle of this picture you can see a black line on the mountain. That is from people coming down this morning.


For the first time it was getting hard to walk, hard to breathe, I was a little shaky, and a headache was coming on, I was starting to feel the affect of the lack of oxygen and altitude around 15,500 feet. This was the highest I have ever been in my life outside the protective shell of an airplane. And tomorrow if everything goes as planned I would shatter this personal record by over an additional 4,000 feet. Speaking of records, Ben would not be breaking his Inca trail record once we arrived in Kibo camp.


It was nice to see our porters needing to rest as well, at this altitude things start to move slowly and carefully.


At Kibo things would get very real. They had a fleet of double sided wheelbarrows, basically a wheel in the middle and two handles on both ends. This is so they can put someone on it and then use 4 porters to run them down to Horombo camp, and present them with the same options. We got to see 3 people evacuated, and this time they take off running fast. They were showing signs of HACE, High Altitude Cerebral Edema, which can be fatal and you have to descend immediately, no matter what the weather and conditions are. It was at this time that I would take my first Diamox pill to help fight off the effects of the altitude. We had a short rest and my headache was going no place when Romlie came to get us for a acclimation hike, this time I was not that excited. 15,580 feet and I’m looking up at a mountain, something was not right, maybe it was the altitude affecting my thinking but I was unable to comprehend it. It was snowing as we headed up, it gave us an idea of what to expect tomorrow, how steep it would be, what the terrain would be like, and how much less oxygen was available. We later came back down and I was wondering if I could pull this off tomorrow, what did I sign up for? And then I remembered I chose to do this and I had very specific reasons for it, and it again became enjoyable. I giggled a little thinking about what I would accomplish tomorrow and what it would mean to me, as my headache slowly vanished. We ate and then quickly went to bed to try and get as much sleep as possible. We would begin our push for the summit shortly after midnight, so tonight’s rest would be brief, and cold.