The Last Hour Before the Summit: What Kilimanjaro Actually Feels Like

I was supposed to climb Kilimanjaro with a group.

A group of travelers from the UK had organized the trip and I had tagged along, booked my flights, flown to Tanzania and arrived at the mountain ready to go. Then, at the last minute, they pulled out. Every one of them.

Which is how I found myself beginning a seven-day climb up the highest mountain in Africa entirely alone. Just me, a guide and a team of sherpas. December 2012. Thirty years old. Not nearly as prepared as I should have been.

It turned out to be one of the most profound experiences of my life.

The Route

I climbed the Rongai route, a seven-day itinerary that approaches Kilimanjaro from the north, along the Kenyan border, and descends via the Marangu route on the other side. It is the only route on the mountain that comes in from the north, which means it is quieter and more remote than almost anything else on offer. For the first several days, the trail felt like it belonged entirely to us. No other groups. Just the mountain, the guides and an increasingly humbling sense of scale.

The Rongai route is considered one of the easier routes on the mountain, with a summit success rate of around eighty to ninety percent on the seven-day itinerary. I say that not to minimize it but to provide context, because even the easier routes on Kilimanjaro are genuinely hard, and only around sixty percent of everyone who attempts the mountain reaches the summit regardless of the route they take. The altitude does not negotiate.

The trail begins in farmland, winding through maize and potato fields before climbing into the forest. The northern slopes of the mountain are drier than the southern side, which means clearer views and less rain, particularly during the wetter months. In December the mountain was cold, dry and startlingly beautiful.

The guides say “pole pole” constantly. Slowly, slowly. It is both instruction and philosophy. Every experienced operator will tell you that the single biggest mistake climbers make is going too fast in the early days when they feel strong. The mountain rewards patience and punishes impatience with brutal consistency.

The Day I Almost Didn’t Make It

Around day three or four, somewhere above four thousand meters, I felt it. Light-headed, dizzy, the kind of disorientation that makes you question everything you are doing. I retreated to my tent and lay there for an afternoon, waiting for it to pass.

It did pass. I was lucky. I watched other climbers on the mountain that week who were not so lucky, people who had to turn back or be assisted down before they had come close to the summit. Altitude sickness does not discriminate by fitness level, age or experience. The only reliable defense against it is time, and the reason the seven-day Rongai itinerary outperforms the six-day version is simply that extra day of acclimatization built into the route.

If I climbed again tomorrow, I would choose a longer route than I chose in 2012. At thirty I was fit, stubborn and fortunate. I am not sure I would rely on all three in the same way now.

The Night Before

On summit day, you go to bed in the afternoon. This felt absurd until I understood the reason. The summit push begins around midnight and the hours of darkness between camp and the crater rim are the hardest of the climb.

The afternoon I went to bed, the weather was poor. Cloud, wind, the kind of conditions that create doubt. I lay in my sleeping bag listening to it and wondering what the morning would bring.

When my guide woke me at midnight, I stepped outside and stopped.

The sky had cleared completely. Every star was visible. The ground around the camp was covered in snow that had fallen while I slept, and it caught the starlight in a way that made the whole mountain feel lit from below. It was one of the most unexpectedly beautiful things I have ever seen, and it happened at midnight at four thousand seven hundred meters because the weather had been bad when I went to sleep.

Some moments only arrive because something else went wrong first.

The Climb

The summit push in darkness is a particular kind of hard. Cold that reaches into places you did not know could get cold. A headtorch beam that shows you exactly enough to place your next step and nothing further.

At some point I looked up. Ahead of me, climbing the face of the mountain, was a zigzag line of headlamps stretching up into the dark. Other climbers on the route, invisible until that moment, each one reduced to a small light moving slowly upward. What the headlamps did not reveal was how steep the face actually was. I could not see the gradient. Looking back, I think that was a good thing.

My hydration pack froze during the climb. The tube, the valve, the water inside it. My sherpa, without being asked, produced a water bottle he had been keeping warm against his chest inside his jacket. He handed it to me without ceremony, the way people do when they have done something a hundred times and know exactly when it is needed.

Somewhere in the darkest part of the climb, with the summit still invisible above me and my legs beginning to have genuine opinions about continuing, I stopped thinking about anything except my feet. One step. Count it. Another step. Count that one too. Nothing else. No summit, no distance, no horizon. Just the next number. It was the only thing that got me through that section of the mountain, and it is the thing I remember most clearly more than twelve years later.

Ahead of me, in the dark, an Australian father from another group was being carried down the mountain past me by his guides. He had fallen ill. His family, I assumed, was somewhere above or below. It was a jarring reminder of what the mountain was capable of, happening in real time, in the dark, at altitude.

Gilman’s Point, and Then the Summit

At Gilman’s Point on the crater rim, sitting at eighteen thousand six hundred feet, the sunrise comes up over Mawenzi Peak.

I did not have words for it at the time and I am not sure I have better ones now. The sun coming up over Tanzania from the rim of Kilimanjaro, the plains below still in darkness, the sky turning colors that have no names. I sat with it for a few minutes and felt something I could not have articulated then and will not try to now.

What I did not know, and nobody had properly told me, was how far Uhuru Peak still was from Gilman’s Point. The true summit sits further along the crater rim, another hour or more of walking at altitude. I had assumed, without really thinking about it, that reaching the rim was reaching the top. It was not.

The sunrise gave me something. Energy, or the feeling of it, which at that altitude is the same thing. I kept going. And when I reached Uhuru Peak, the highest point in Africa at five thousand eight hundred and ninety five meters, I stood there alone.

The group from the UK who had been meant to make this climb with me were at home. My guide and sherpas were a respectful distance away. There was nobody else at the summit in that moment.

I had a significant amount of time to think on that mountain, seven days of it, most of which I spent with my guide learning about Tanzania, about his life, about the mountain from the perspective of someone who had climbed it more times than he could remember. That conversation, drawn out over a week at altitude, changed how I understand travel. Not as a series of destinations but as a series of encounters with people who see the world entirely differently to the way you do.

The Descent

Coming down took two days and was, relative to everything that preceded it, genuinely enjoyable. The descent via the Marangu route moves quickly, guides helping you find your footing on the loose rock and rubble, almost gliding down sections that would have taken an hour to climb. I found it exhilarating in a way the ascent never quite was.

I also sustained a minor injury to my left knee on the way down, a slip on the rocks that has left my kneecap sitting slightly differently than it once did. It has never given me serious trouble. I consider it a reasonable souvenir.

I flew home the day after reaching the summit. I wanted to be back in Australia for Christmas. Sitting on the plane, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, I tried to process what had happened over the previous week and found I could not quite do it. Some experiences need more distance than a single flight can provide.

What I Would Tell You

I did not research or prepare as well as I should have. At thirty, with the fitness I had, I was fortunate. I would not recommend that approach to a client and I would not take it myself again.

If you are considering Kilimanjaro, here is what actually matters. Choose a seven-day route rather than a six-day one. The extra acclimatization day meaningfully improves your chances of summiting. Choose an operator with experienced local guides who know the signs of altitude sickness and will make the right call if something goes wrong. Go slower than you think you need to. Pole pole is not a tourist phrase. It is the reason some people reach the summit and others do not.

And if the group you were meant to climb with pulls out at the last minute, go anyway.

Some things are better done alone.