He was an average hiker. This wasn't your average hike.
By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 18, 2001
The sun just came up. And that's what killed me.
Before I could see, I was merely miserable. My pulse has been pounding in my ears for hours. My lungs bellow franticallyfutile gulps in a merciless vacuum. My legs are noodly and unreliable. My boots barely leave the ground as I drag them a few inches up the slope. It's no more than a zombie lurch, but without resting between each step my heart redlines and my chest heaves until my ribs ache. This is more than fatigue; it's fear.
Am I having a heart attack (I'm 36)? Is this the altitude sickness that has killed climbers on this same trail? After six hours of this, I'm as close as I've ever been to utter physical bankruptcy.
But at least in darkness, all I could see were my feet shuffling through the feeble two-foot disk of light from my headlamp. Some dutiful clot of neurons has kept me moving forward as the rest of my brain took cover beneath a circular, muttering rhythm that muffled the pain: step-gasp-step.
Now the sun is up. I can see where I am and, worse, what I am, a presumptuous speck a thousand feet above the cloud line on Mount Kilimanjaro's towering slope. Idiotically, I let the pink warmth on my cheek distract me from my plodding trance and I make the first really serious mistake of the day. I look up.
Oh no. Oh no. I have to be closer than this. There's no breath for a sob but I feel despair strike me like a slap. I'm supposed to be near the top by now, but the mountain is endless above me; the slope is growing even steeper. Hours to the top, and after that I face another marathon strugglea 10-hour scramble down rocky, slippery trails. Going up is bad, but long descents are agony: knees shrieking, thighs on fire. Standing in a fog of my own panting, I feel my body failing. I can't do it. I hate this.
I quit.
The first days weren't so hurtful. In fact, the run-up to the summit of Kilimanjaro was one of the most pleasurable treks of my hiking career. Six days of well-guided, well-fed tramping around one of the world's most recognizable landforms, followed by one day in the life of Sisyphusan 18-hour ordeal that brought me face to face with one of adventure travel's most frightening inherent risks: failure.
We had gathered in Kenya a week earlier, six American males ranging in age from 32 to 63, ranging in fitness from lifelong runner to occasional walk taker. Some were friends already, others met for the first time on the Nairobi sidewalk outside the Stanley Hotel as we boarded a bus to Tanzania. But we quickly coalesced as a group around a shared nugget of uncertainty: Just how hard was this going to be?
On the five-hour ride we titillated ourselves, as adventurers do, with overheard tales of Kilimanjaro failure and fear, blackouts and whiteouts, heart attacks, rock slides, frostbite, dodgy guides and dysenteryand lots and lots of folks who just couldn't do it.
"I get a lot of people who have absolutely no idea what they are in for," says Mia Favro, a sprightly Swiss expatriate who runs Shades of Africa, a Tanzanian tour and safari company. "You can never tell who's going to make it. I've had marathoners who said it was the hardest thing they've ever done and could only make it halfway. You either take the altitude or you don't."
At just shy of 20,000 feet, Kilimanjaro ranks fourth among the Seven Summits, the roster of each continent's highest peak that serves as the basic to-do list for serious mountaineers. (Asia's Everest tops them all at 29,000 feet; Antarctica's 16,000-foot Mount Vinson is lowest.) But because of its cliff-free approaches and unforgettable snowcapped profile on the vast African plain, Kilimanjaro is the most popular with amateur adventurers. Unlike the other Seven Summits, any reasonably fit hiker has a chance to reach Kili's desolate rim without crampons, carabiners or technical expertise.
But rope free doesn't mean risk free, and far more people start up Kilimanjaro than make it to the top. There is just about half the oxygen in the air at 20,000 feet as there is at sea level, meaning that simply standing still demands a double exertion of heart and lungs. And no amount of training can protect you from altitude's scariest physiological thunderbolts, which range from headaches and vomiting to edemas that fell youdeadon the side of the mountain as fluid fills your brain or lungs. It really happens.
Outside, Africa rolled by. Lanky Masai herdsmen walked the highway, heavily ornamented and cloaked in red cloth, swinging their ubiquitous staffs. The broad plain, unbroken but for isolated baobab trees, gave no hint we were nearing a mountain almost a mile higher than any peak in the continental United States. We compared gear and training notes. Sometimes we silently gauged one another. "Will he make it?" we wondered. "Will I?"
I contribute my own worst-case anecdote after our first hazy glimpse of Kili's summit glacier, hanging like a puff of cloud impossibly high above the horizon. Last year, a Washington friend of mine named Margaret McDaniel was part of a team laboring toward Kilimanjaro's summit. Already spooked by news of two altitude-related deaths a few days earlier, they found themselves suddenly pinned down by a rock slide. They dodged the boulders, but then came upon a German couple she had befriended at earlier camps. The man was standing dazed on the trail. His wife was lying prone, covered by a jacket, killed by a bouncing rock.
"We went up with a sort of intangible understanding that this could be dangerous," McDaniel says now. "But suddenly it was real. Someone was dead."
We all had stories to swap. But still we came, cheerfully. Just like McDaniel, we had acquainted ourselves with the risks without firmly shaking hands with the central reality that this vacation could kill us.
Most of the people who make a try at Kilimanjaro each year ant-line it up a single rutted, littered track called the Marangu route. They bunch together each night at a few camps crowded with trinket and soft-drink vendors. Instead, we opted for a more remote trail head far out on Kilimanjaro's long western rump. Our route across Kili's largely untrammeled Shira Plateau added two days to our climb and, reportedly, a few crucial degrees of difficulty to our summit attempt. But it gave us extra time to adjust to the altitude and some priceless hours simply to enjoy the unpeopled parts of the mountain.
That's not to say we would be alone. After lurching though the cedar forests that fringe the mountain's shoulders, we pulled up to a trail head crowded with men and boys: our porters. They divided our gear, along with our common tents, food and fuel, into separate 50-pound duffels. Eyeing the load, our head guide Gasper Lekule signed up enough folks to carry it: 22 people to support the six of us over the seven-day climb17 porters, four guides and a cook. The rest set out for their homes to wait for another chance to earn $10 a day on the mountain.
We paying climbers carried nothing but our personal loads of water, trail snacks, rain gear, cameras. Everything else disappeared up the trail each morning balanced on the heads of Tanzanian men we wouldn't see again until we reached camp that evening. Even with full loads, and with climbing togs that often consisted of blown-out tennis shoes and threadbare street clothes, the porters outpaced us by hours.
Two guides remained with us, one at the point setting the requisite slow pace, and a sweep bringing up the rear. It felt liberating to be underway, especially with plenty of air for chatting and laughing. The clouds came, marking the line between bright mornings and rainy afternoons that became a daily pattern. As we gained altitude, the rain thickened to sleet and we watched the clouds climb up the slopes to deliver it. Never had I been so glad of my pricey, extravagant kit: polypropylene underwear, layers of synthetics, a plush sleeping bag. I surrounded myself with unnatural fibers and stayed warm and dry. On Kilimanjaro, good gear tells.
The trail turned slippery and steeper. Charles Moerbeour oldest team member, a soft-spoken retired oilman who now raises longhorns near Austinsuddenly had his feet fly out from under him. He hooked an arm around a small sapling, missing by an elbow a 40-foot slide down the bank. We dusted him off, exchanging a few arched eyebrows. The mountain was tapping us on the shoulder. Kilimanjaro doesn't turn away all its pilgrims, but it demands of them a supplicant's posture: a processional pace, a lowered head. "Pole, pole," the guides say in Swahili. "Slowly, slowly" became our plainchant.
Matthewthe boyish young guide at the head of our linecarried, of all things, our eggs. Deemed too fragile for a porter's pack, he carried four dozen of them stacked in cardboard pallets bound with twine. I watched them, their numbers dwindling after every breakfast. "If he can get a bunch of raw eggs up Kilimanjaro," I thought, "he can deliver six amateur climbers."
Every day we walked and walked and walked, often in rain and snow. The world opened up as we left the trees behind. The Shira Plateau was a long scrubby flat at 12,500 feet that took a day to cross. A stray dog followed us this far, hoping we were one of the poaching parties that sometimes hunt this high. But he gave up when we began to gain altitude in earnest. More of Tanzania spread beneath us, green and utterly separate from the chilly, airless world that drew us ever upward. We rose above even the bizarre shrubs that cling to Kili's middle ranges. Now only rocks brushed our boots. One morning, we had to wait for the sun to strike the towering Barranco Wall to burn off enough ice for us to scramble up the rock cracks in safety.
Slowly, swinging the collapsible trekking poles thatlike the Masaiwe were never without, we crept up a trail of numbers: 13,000 feet, 15,000, up to 17,000 on one breathless morning and then back down to a safer sleeping altitude. We were beginning to kiss the toes of the summit itself, giving our bodies little tastes of the strange new demands we were putting on them.
The mountain, meanwhile, increased its tests, reminding us to be careful of our health, strength and attitude. We constantly fine-tuned our aches and rumbles from the movable pharmacy brought by Michael Teixido, a physician from Delaware. We ate well at lavish dinners of chicken, stews and pasta, served with rough elegance in the green mess tent. We slept, sometimes fitfully, in tents we found already pitched when we arrived in camp, waking to cups of "bed tea" brought soon after dawn. We began to finish one another's jokes about the crude latrines, guess one another's preferences at tableall the shortcuts of fast friendship. We shared equipment, confided fears, watched one another for signs of sunburn and sickness. We were ready to summit.
Climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro from a 15,000-foot base camp is like mounting the stairs of a 500-story skyscraper with a sock in your mouth and a clothespin on your nose. There is just no air. After a midnight breakfast, we set out with four guides (the extras needed to escort down sick or injured climbers).
We walkslowly, slowlywith a silent intensity, a line of bobbing headlamps in the night. Charles Moerbe has been vomiting. His Texas pal John Joseph, a competitive runner, can't catch his breath no matter how slowly he walks. Michael Tsia, a sportswriter from Honolulu, admits to nausea and a sharp headache. I feel healthy, but after just an hour fatigue has a firm grip on my ankles.
Hours later, when the sun comes up, I'm only on the 400th floor of that 500-story building. I'm supposed to be at the top for dawn. But when I look up, I know in that instant that this day's sun won't be casting my shadow across the peak of Kilimanjaro.
I lean against a rock, waiting for a recovery that's not possible at 19,000 feet. Two guides from another party appear, supporting a climber down the slopea fit-looking young man, now pale and frightened, clearly suffering from the altitude. He too will go home to report failure. As the light grows, I see George Norcrossanother Hawaiian, our strongest hikermaking steady progress. He'll make it. He'll have a great story to tell. Mine will always carry an asterisk, a defensive explanation. I had to quit.
Or do I? After 15 minutes of rest I'm beginning to freeze, but I also feel the first flush of defiance against my failing will. I see Michael Tsia, upright in spite of his nausea. John Joseph is twice my age and can barely breathe, but there he is, baby-stepping upward. He and Moerbe have printed greetings to their grandsons that they are determined to photograph at the top. Michael Teixido is beside him, giving both medical and moral support.
If they were strangers, these five tourists would be no example for me. But over six days of shared adventure, they are now my friendsand more. We were group tourists, but we call ourselves a team. And through the pain of exhaustion I begin to believe that.
With a grunt that is half groan, half profanity, I force myself away from the rock. My heart starts jackhammering in my ears, but I fix my eyes on my boot toes and begin a glacial shuffle up the trail. This time, I never look up.
I made it, three hours later. We all did.
Sweat Scale: 5. All sweat, no shower.
Genuine Danger: 4. The worst need not happen, but does.
Bragging Rights: 4. Everest is 5.
Cush Factor: 3. Tea in the tent, but the tent was freezing.
Nature-in-the-Raw: 4. Seven outdoor days of rain and snow felt very natural.
Downside: The hardest thing I've ever done.
Upside: I did it.
Outfitter: iExplore (800-439-7567, www.iexplore.com), in conjunction with Journeys International (800-255-8735, www.journeys-intl.com)
Cost: $2,730, plus $1,149 airfare (D.C. to Nairobi via Amsterdam), plus $200 for Nairobi hotel
Length: Nine days, seven on the mountain
Future trips: Trips depart year-round with as few as two climbers
Similar: Many operators offer Kilimanjaro trips within a wide price range. Some examples: Gorp.com (877-440-4677, www.gorp.com) offers a climb up the easier Marangu route for $1,250; Mountain Travel Sobek (888-687-6235, www.mtsobek.com) offers the longer Machame route with some safari add-ons starting at $4,640.