Up the Western Breach!

Glacier at Crater Camp

What a mind and body-blowing day. It's a good thing Ben, Jerome and Noel did not explain today's route, which gained 2,700 feet and took us 8.5 hours, was vertical and then more vertical. It took every ounce of energy to get to camp. When we started out, we'd only gone about 30 minutes and Christina stopped to let everyone go ahead. I think she is resting, but they radio Noel and say Christina's heart is racing and she is dizzy, that he should go back to her in case she needs to go down the mountain. They decide Christina should not continue and send her down the mountain with Noel, Lemetu, two other porters and an assistant cook. They'll meet us at the base camp when we descend tomorrow.

As we climb, we stop occasionally to drink water or use a nearby rock. Sometimes the sun shines, sometimes a cold, cold cloud moves in dropping snow pellets on us. As we sit on rocks around the luncheon spread, ice droplets come down. Today is so intense. After taking a particularly vertical set of steps, I stop to allow my heart rate to slow. The Western Breach is supposedly the hardest climb of the entire trek. I know why. The lava formed and was broken in vertical and horizontal pieces. It's quite beautiful to look at. And the way the pieces broke up over the millennia creates steps of varying heights. So we tackle the ascent by zigzagging when possible.

A group of hikers who camped near us last night got up at Midnight to begin their ascent up the breach. They hoped to arrive at the summit by 9 or 10 a.m. That must be so hard, climbing in the dark and cold. We are about 100 feet from the crater rim when our porters arrive, climbing down to take our day packs and assist us the final 30 minutes to camp. It is heartwarming to see Lingarevo and it helps sooooo much when he takes my pack. Otherwise, it will take 1.5 hours to go this last bit. Ben does not want us to go straight to our tents and instead encourages us to walk around and photograph the glacier. This massive ice structure is the first thing we see when we ascend the crater rim. The glacier has straight up sides and is beautiful.

There is dark gray sand on this part of the mountain, resembling a beach. So Neal brings out a Frisbee and umbrella and sits against the glacier for a photo. He ends up with glacier on his tacos (butt). He then talks Mike into filming a scene of us playing Frisbee on Kilimanjaro. We only throw the Frisbee three times, but it wears me out. My legs and butt muscles are tight from over-working and my shoulders are sore from the pack. Tomorrow we will wake up at 5 and head for the summit at 6. The water we drink in camp tonight and tomorrow comes from the glacier. The porters keep trekking across the sand to ax pick the ice into their 5-gallon buckets, then they bring it to camp for boiling. It's hard work just walking across the sand, navigating around rocks. How do they carry the weight? These men are amazing and we're all in awe of them. Noel has made the climb 87 times, Ben 120. Nazareth, who is working to be an assistant guide like Noel, has gone up 12 times. They don't take Diamox, nor do they always wear hats and gloves when we do. They want us to think they are used to the low levels of oxygen and cold temperatures. I don't know.

Dinner is being served now but I'm not hungry. And everything I eat goes straight through. But I'll continue to eat and make trips to the frozen toilet to keep my energy up. I'm so glad I didn't know exactly how strenuous/difficult this climb is. It's cold here and will drop below 15 degrees Fahrenheit tonight. Only 15 more hours of cold then we'll return to warmth. Just one more extremely cold night in a tent and using a frozen toilet seat and waking fully dressed. I'll never climb Kili again, so I hope the photos turn out beautifully!