The mountain has landed a few body blows. Ty is dehydrated and badly sunburned. He wobbles off to bed without eating. The rest of us gather in the mess tent to sip tea and watch darkness fall.

The next morning we wake up grizzled and half-spent, hair as unruly as Stan Laurel's in a gale-force wind. I epitomize one of Lloyd's cracker barrel expressions: "You look like you were rode hard and put away wet."

The Western Breach Part II is our gut check. For eight hours we follow Remmy single file up, over, and around a massive pipe organ of rock, the angle of ascent hovering at a breath-robbing 60 degrees. Every turn in the trail reveals another stone staircase. I feel as if we are opening the proverbial gag gift: a box within a box within a box within a box.

Nobody is knocking on Remmy's cranial door. He puffs contentedly on a cigarette during rest breaks. Indeed, the porters and guides are all nicotine fiends. Someday researchers are going to discover the swirling clouds that perpetually shroud Kilimanjaro are really secondhand smoke.

Shortly after 3pm. we crest the ridgeline of the Western Breach. The world looks blessedly flat again, though conspicuously drained of color. To our left, a vast snow field leads to the lip of a dormant crater, the center of volcanic activity that originally formed Kilimanjaro. About a half-mile straight ahead is a meandering wall of pale blue glacier ice. It looks like someone has been strip mining menthol eucalyptus cough drops. Beyond lies the last relatively-benign lump of mountain, culminating in Uhuru Peak. Remmy grins and gives each of us a soul handshake.

"Congratulations," he says, knowing how glad we are to be done with the Western Breach. "You made it."

"Nothin' to it," says Lloyd with a shrug. "Piece o' granite."

Move on to The Summit Return to Top

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