Thursday, July 6, 2023; Day 7

It’s been noisy throughout the night as teams of hikers from Barafu pass through after midnight. They seem to make no effort toward keeping quiet, and there’s singing and shouts as they pass.

Our 3am wakeup call arrives quickly, and most of us are up at 2:45am, eager to get started. Looking toward the mountain, we can see the lights of those groups who passed by hours ago as they reach the rim at Stella Point.

Fortunately, it’s not too cold, hovering at 40F in our tent.

Since we’ll be returning back to this camp tonight, we don’t need to pack up our tends. I spend my time savings re-finalizing my ascent outfit. I end up picking my thickest Smart Wool socks, removing the boot insoles I’d tried out yesterday (because they won’t fit with the socks). I put on my convertible hiking pants with my rain/shell pants over the top. On top, I wear my midweight wool base layer under my Craft/Decker Half Marathon tech shirt for its 5th or 6th wearing this trip– remarkably, it still smells of laundry detergent, not sweat. Over the shirt, I wear my Patagonia light puffer jacket, and the North Face rain shell. I wear my wool hat and my headlamp, the first time I’ve hiked with it and one of the few times I’ve used it at all (since my small red flashlight was usually fine for getting around in camp).

At the last moment, I decide not to wear my heavy snow gloves and instead just keep the thin gloves I’ve been wearing for most of the trip. This decision turned out to be a mistake — sunrise was hours away and my hands got super cold holding my poles. Combined with the tingle of a full dose of Diamox, it was unpleasant from our 4:06am departure until the sun was high enough to raise the temperature around 7am.

Today’s hike is a very long, very slow slog uphill with a huge number of winding switchbacks. The pace was glacial, perhaps 1/3 as fast as a slow walk. For most of the hike I was worried about my belly — there was no place to poop this morning that would not be horrifically awkward.

Around an hour in, I notice a painful level of pressure in the back right part of my head. I assume it is an altitude effect and as it worsens, my worry builds that I’ll soon have to turn back. After a few minutes of increasing pain and worry, I tentatively take both of my poles into my left hand and use my right hand to check whether rubbing my skull will have any impact on the pain. My hands meet the large solid plastic buckle of my headlamp that I’ve long forgotten that I’m wearing. I shift the buckle and the pain vanishes. I’m so relieved that I laugh out loud. My confidence soars. Nothing’s going to stop me.

The sun starts to come up and dramatically lights up Mawenzi Peak. We take short water breaks every hour or so.

When we look back at how little distance we’ve covered, it seems almost like a joke. In this photo, our camp is 6 hours’ hike behind us, and Barafu Camp an hour behind that.

We pass by a number of small groups coming down from the summit and applaud their success. We see one guy being hustled down the mountain just before Stella Point, clearly in bad shape.

Eventually we crest the rim at Stella Point at 11:01 am, perhaps an hour behind schedule.

While relieved to have reached the rim, I still feel bloated and uncomfortable at Stella, and my self-measured oxygen saturation is an absurd 72%. My pulse has been at ~120 all morning. We can see the sign at Uhuru Peak from Stella, and Jason uses his Galaxy S23 camera’s insane zoom to read the sign from where we stand, an impressive feat. “So, does that mean we don’t even need to go over there?” I joke.

We were offered a small lunch of which I ate around half, although I was not hungry.

After a bit, lunch was over and we embarked on the hike around the crater rim to Uhuru Peak. It seems so close, but it’s around a mile away and another 500 feet up. We’re still walking super slowly and I worry about my belly most of the way. We take some nice pictures of the depressingly vanishing glaciers along the path.

Jason drops his phone and it begins to slide down the scree beside the trail. Fortunately, he manages to grab it before it’s gone forever. I bend down to pick up a piece of volcanic rock and my camera tumbles out of the top of my pack, hitting the ground hard. Oops. It doesn’t seem to take much damage, thankfully.

At one point I realize that my belly is literally bulging and that’s going to be visible in my all important pictures at Uhuru Peak. Ugh.

Finally, around 12:56pm, we reach the sign at Uhuru Peak and picture taking begins. We’re lucky as it’s only our group — all of the morning crowds are gone, and we only saw a few small parties of threes and fours on the rim at all. A cloud rolling in seems to be waiting patiently for us to depart.

We take many combinations of photos in front of the sign. There’s not a ton else to see, alas, as the cloud cover again precludes seeing the ground. We snap some photos of the glacier inside the crater and a faded plaque adjacent to the sign.

Robert sits on a rock and reads a letter his wife wrote him to open at the top and seems moved by it. I hop up on a small boulder rock behind the sign, as I decide I should make really sure that I hit the highest point on the continent. Although, to be honest, it kinda looks like we might’ve been a few feet higher than this on a hill we crossed on the way here. It’s hard to say.

After ten minutes of wandering around, I finally fart (so so much flatulence on this trip, OMG) and feel much better, although I still worry that I’m not going to make it through the 2.5-3 hour descent back to Kosovo. After 5 more minutes of milling about, half of the party (including my brother who has a headache) decide to start the descent. I’m feeling pretty good now, with my oxygen saturation having improved to 82%, but I figure that I’ve achieved what I’ve come to achieve and heading back is the smart move.

My porter grabs my daypack as I’m putting it on and he wore it back to camp, a huge and unexpected treat even though it’s probably under 10 pounds at this point.

Pausing back at Stella, our half of the group further splits into a “fast” and “slow” set, with the older folks bringing up the rear. Seeing the wind drive up the dust, I put on my balaclava for the first time.

Our trip back started out rough — downhills are hard, especially over the loose scree, and we’re not doing as many switchbacks as we did on the way up. Liza has a porter on each arm hustling her down the mountain and we joke that she really is the Princess of the tribes. At one point, the cloud cover perfectly frames Mawenzi:

Before long, we’ve finished the treacherous parts and we get to the best part of the day and one of the most fun parts of the trip– “skiing” down through the dust and scree with my poles. It was fun and fast — our 8 hour ascent is reversed with just a 90 minute descent.

When we reach camp, porters have pulled out the chairs from the dining tent for us and served us cups of fruit juice while swatting the dust off our boots and pants. I never did put on the gaiters I was told to carry, but it didn’t matter– I still had no rocks in my tall Quest 4D boots, and my pants dusted off pretty cleanly as well.

Within a few hours, all of our hikers have made it back to camp. There’s a birthday celebration for Robert, who’s just turned 70, and we all share a cake brought up for the occasion.

I don’t write any more in my journal today. Tired and happy, I expect we’ll all sleep well tonight.

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