Climbing Kilimanjaro, Kmart Style

Kilimanjaro's summit at sunrise: a peak experience

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Jason and I were cold, uncomfortable, and aesthetically offensive in our rented outfits. John and Claire, it turned out, hadn't brought any real climbing clothes, either. This was their first trip up a mountain and they were under the impression that a few cotton T-shirts and a fleece jacket would be fine. Neither of them brought flashlights. I'm not sure if records are kept on this sort of thing, but we may have been the most poorly equipped team ever to attempt Kilmanjaro.

On the fourth day, we set up camp at 13,200 feet, napped from 6 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., took a quick swig of coffee, then started toward the summit in the dark. John and Claire stumbled along without flashlights on the rocky trail. Two hours later, the air became preposterously thin, nearly squelching John's banter, but not quite. At this height, you could get oxygen depravation arching your eyebrows, yet this is when the trail became vertical. Lucas, who suddenly admitted he hadn't taken this route for a while, looked a bit lost.

We scrambled up loose rock to a steep, 15-yard-wide ice patch. Without an ice ax or crampons, it was a sketchy traverse. One slip and you end up 75 yards down the mountain with your head wrapped around a rock. I took off my gloves and tried to dig my nails into the ice for added stability. There were a few close calls, but no one took the express ride down.After two more such crossings, we reached the bouldering portion of the climb. Shimmying up the rocks wouldn't have been a problem a few thousand feet down the mountain, but at 18,000 feet our heads were spinning. I could hardly stand, and the wind picked up, freezing the sweat in our clothes.

"Only two hours more to the summit," Lucas declared as we reached the rim of the volcano after four hours of hiking. My heart sank.

"I thought you said it was four hours to the top," I mumbled, shivering and befuddled. Lucas had clearly doctored the figures to make this route more attractive, but the only realistic way down was to first press on to the top. A few hours overdue, the summit came into sight."Look, it's just up there. You made it. We're the first ones," Lucas declared. With that, he gave me a hearty slap on the back, knocking me a few yards back down the mountain. Miraculously, we reached the summit about 10 seconds before the sun's first rays crept over the horizon. Exhausted, overwhelmed by the cold, rugged surroundings, and mesmerized by the fiery red ball rising before us, Claire began to cry. John, Jason, and I stood in silence, completely stunned, then grabbed our cameras and began snapping away.After five minutes of euphoria, my headache and dizziness abated. The effort was suddenly all worth it. None of the words I had read about reaching the top prepared me for the experience, and I'm certain neither my laptop nor camera can do it justice. Fifteen minutes later, the peak began crowding with hikers. It was time to head down. The lower we got, the more people we saw making early, altitude-sickness-related retreats. Seeing them turn back evoked an odd mixture of sympathy and affirmation of our accomplishment. The punishment for our success, I didn't realize, was still ahead: a five-hour descent to our camp at 10,000 feet. This was, in some ways, more difficult than reaching the summit. As my feet and torso defrosted, my legs turned to rubber and my toes jammed into the front of my boots. By the time we reached camp, my blisters looked more like bullet wounds.After a muddy, three-hour limp to the bottom the following day, we were met by park rangers at the gate selling"Just Did It" T-shirts. It occurred to me that these were the first rangers I'd seen since I paid the $375 park entry fee six days before. Usage of the fees didn't seem to extend more than five inches into the park. There has been zero upkeep on the trail, no shelters for the porters, and no rescue stations (although part of this money is meant for rescue operations).But the porters had the last laugh. When it came time to hand out tips, there were two porters on hand that I had never seen before."We needed these men to run ahead and prepare the camp," Lucas explained in dramatic fashion. This was a common ploy.Lucas and the others would later split the tips for our fictional porters—a whopping $10.