Day 5 – Barafu Camp to Stella Point and Uhuru Peak (and back) The summit day started around 1am with the aim of seeing the sunrise close to the summit and also allowing enough daylight for the long descent back down to 3000m. We awoke at 1am and I was keen to get up and get started. It was pretty cold but not as cold as I anticipated and as we drank a warming cup of tea and had a few biscuits I actually felt a bit hot – I was wearing thermal base layers, t-shirt, a thin fleece, a thick fleece, trousers, waterproof jacket/trousers (to keep the wind out), ski gloves, woolly hat and fleece balaclava! I took off the thick fleece and felt cold! I think we were all feeling apprehensive, so there was plenty of reassuring each other we would be ok. Saranjit and I debated whether to take the Diamox - a drug designed to ease altitude sickness – but eventually decided not to bother as there were some potentially nasty side effects and we had got this far without it. Again, I just wanted to get going straight away but frustratingly, it took a while for everyone to get sorted. It was pitch black when we started walking, so we were all wearing head-torches, which offered visibility to just in front of your feet. Finally, we set off and moved through the campsite towards the path to the summit at a very slow pace. I had previously read that there is no such thing as walking too slow on the summit night and that it’s best to take it steady to allow your body to acclimatise. Therefore, I was happy with plodding up watching the feet of the person in front and not doing a lot else! Initially the path was a bit rocky but it soon flattered out into a shale path, that had a relentless series of zig zags up towards the summit. It was uphill all the way, there would be no downhill until we reached the top! There really wasn’t much to see apart from the feet of the guy in front of you, occasionally I would look up and see a line of head torches way above us and wonder how much further there was to go! The temperature seemed to get colder as we got higher up(I was happy to have kept all the layers on now!) and I pulled my balaclava tightly to minimise any skin exposed to the chilly air. We only stopped occasionally to catch our breath, that 5 second break was heavenly. I’d been looking forward to watching the sun coming up and it started to rise at around 6:30am, it energised us but also showed us that we had a long way to go still. I was feeling pretty knackered though and the last section was on deep scree, that was very tiring as you went back a footstep for every three you went forward. I set myself little targets like the next big boulder and where I would rest for a few minutes and lean over my walking poles to breathe, which was definitely more difficult. Nearly an hour from the summit, Saranjit pulled up and said he needed to rest but he motioned me to keep going. We had come such a long way together that it felt strange to keep going on without him beside me. We had a break soon after and I could see that he was still walking up and that made me feel so much better. We had developed a great bond over the last week and it felt good that we were going to finish this together. After that brief rest I heard one of the guides say that the summit was “not far, only thirty minutes”, unfortunately Africa runs on a different timescale so it was fair to say I was doubtful, but suddenly it didn’t look too much further. The last hour had been the most painful and I would have easily given up had I been given the chance. This is where the mental state takes over. I had dreamt of reaching the summit so many times in the previous months and what I was going to do when I got there and that thought kept me going. Unfortunately, higher up the shale got deeper and this made things a lot more tiring. I guess this lasted for about 30 mins, eventually we pulled ourselves up onto Stella Point at 5752m. Im not sure if it was the altitude (apparently it can induce emotion!) or the joy of knowing the hard bit was over but we all got a bit emotional, it was a feeling of great elation to have gotten this far. My first thought was that it wasn’t how I expected – Its not a classic mountain summit with a defined peak. The signpost informed us that we were now at the highest point in Africa, on the highest freestanding mountain in the world at 5895m. The view with the glazier, the clouds far below, and the crater was outstanding. There were quite a few people at the summit and everyone took turns having their photo taken with the signpost. I forced down an energy bar but it was too cold to sit around for too long and after one last look around the crater we followed down the scree. Going down was a lot lot easier than coming up as you could ski the scree down – it was however tiring on the knees and given that we had now been on the go for 8 or 9 hours we were pretty shattered! A couple of times I took long breaks and sat on a rock, it was hard to get moving again but I was looking forward to a lie down back at the campsite. I also found my the skin around my nose and lips to be cracked and sore – we all suffered this, probably bought on by breathing very cold air and not helped by the cold I suffered for the past 2 days. Around two hours after we left Stella Point we arrived back to the camp, immediately I went straight in the tent and because the mattress and sleeping bags were put away I just lay on the hard floor and passed out! I think I was out for about 30-45mins at which point the others were sat having a brew. Unfortunately, there was still more of a decent to do as we had to go from 4600m to 3000m that afternoon, so there was little time for a rest – I was dreading it! However, after some food (the soup was great) I felt a lot better and was now eager to just get on with it and get back down. The decent was actually not that bad and as we started I felt re-energised, possibly due to the fact that there was more oxygen about the more we descended! Unfortunately there were a lot of steps on the trail, which just hurt our knees and obviously weren’t popular as alternative paths had been made just to the side of the main trail. The vegetation got bigger and bigger and soon it shaded the path completely. We kept thinking the campsite “must be around the corner” but the path just kept going! Eventually the jungle reappeared and our campsite with it! It had taken us 2-3 hours to descend what had take us 4 days to ascend! That day, we had walked for around 22 hours of the past 35! The Mweka campsite was busy and noisy with lots of groups and porters having done the hard bit and now letting off some steam. It was still cold, but I was enjoying the richer air (everything felt fresh and suddenly I wasn’t coughing and so bugged up) and the not so desolate campsite! I spoke too soon as during the night we were hit by a sandstorm and there was dust everywhere, Im not entirely sure how it got inside the tent but we were covered in the filthy muck.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 21:14:40 +0000
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