Most of the camping spots before this were empty except for our group, but at Arrow Camp lots of crews were merging from different routes, so there were tents and people all over the place. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of a man loudly puking outside of his tent. I unzipped the tent and looked out to see that it was a man that Stace and I had talked to the evening before. I wonder if he made it to the summit? The level of altitude at Arrow camp and above is seriously nothing to mess around with...Throughout the entire trip, we had a porter named Roger whose entire job was to stay not far from us and carry the Hyper Chamber Gamow bag. This is the bag that's used if you have issues such as pulmonary edema or cerebral edema and have to be rushed off the mountain. They inflate this bag, throw you in it, and carry you off the mountain. The oxygen inside the bag is like sea level and it can save your life. At the hotel before we started the climb, we actually met a man who had to be saved from pulmonary edema while he was at Crater Camp.
So we got up early in the morning in the freezing cold and started our ascent to Crater Camp. And then from Crater Camp it would only be a couple more hours to the summit. The goal was to camp at Crater Camp, and then summit the following day. We knew that once we started on this route, there was no turning back as it was too steep to take you back down. You had to get to the top. My first memory was how cold it was...it seemed to take at least an hour for me to feel my feet. The climb was a winding, switchback sort of walking up the side of the slope. There were a couple places where they roped us in for safety, but I distinctly remember thinking "Why here?" It seemed there were several places prior to being roped in that I was in serious danger too - but without ropes for safety....
I remember it was so steep and we could see so far down that it took me about 4-5 hours before I could look down the side of the mountain. We would stop and I would sit and stare at my boots. I told Hatch she had to take pics for me b/c I just couldn't look. I had no idea until this moment in time, that I was this afraid of heights...yeah, a great way to find out huh? Once I did look, the tents a couple thousand feet down at Arrow Camp were the size of my pinky nail.
So we were going from about 16,000 to 18,370 ft. that day, and all in all it took us about 10 hours. You can't help thinking hours into this gruelling day that they advertised this online as "a walk in the park"...and it makes you kinda angry...
We would stop periodically for rests. They took our oxygen saturation at various times during this day to make sure we weren't in serious danger, or dying, or something. Stace was nauseous most of the day from the altitude. We were both exhausted from climbing for so long. Ed from Canada wasn't a very steady hiker and he kept slipping...he was hiking in front of me so I kept thinking that if he went down he was taking me with him... There was nowhere to go to the bathroom, so I literally had to ask everyone to turn around so that I could pee right there. And then I moved a foot or two over and ate my lunch. It's rough folks...
At one point during a break, Stacy turned around and looked at me and said something to the effect of, "I just need to cry." At which point I totally agreed, and the two of us sat there and started bawling. Not serious, mature, silent tears, but total and complete girl crying...
It felt kinda good - as crying usually does...until our guide Francis cut into our therapy session and in a stern tone said words I'll never, ever forget...
"Damas (sisters), you MUST stop crying.....there is not enough oxygen for that."
Wow - talk about a mood killer. And do you know how hard it is to stop crying once you have fully given in to it? But we wanted to die less than we wanted to cry so we sucked it up and stopped. Can't even have a good cry on Kili when you need to...
Ten hours after we started the climb that day, we finally made it to Crater Camp at 18,370. Gorgeous blue glaciers and a volcano crater steaming with sulfer awaited us...but man...it was a rough road there.
