Kilimanjaro Summit Night Jan 4/5, 2024

I woke up to the noise of Godfred saying it was time to get ready to leave. My dad and I got dressed in our warmest clothes, grabbed our bags, and went to eat "breakfast" at 10pm. Every summit night, I am always very nervous and my head is scrambled until we leave. This summit night began like all of the others. I was trying to pour my drink mix into my water bottles, but instead, I was pouring water all over myself. I barely had anything to eat before it was time to go.

Our group stood in a circle outside holding hands as our guide Tendi Sherpa said a prayer to the mountains for safe passage. Then we left and it started to snow. It was pitch black outside and all we could see was the line of headlamps leading up the mountain. Five minutes in, I was feeling great. I had so much energy and the temperature was perfect. Tendi had said that the time would go by fast, and I didn't believe him until I looked at my watch and it said three hours had gone by. I was starting to feel tired, so I snacked on energy gummies as we continued up. I was second in line and had been talking with one of my group members in front of me. Talking helped distract me from getting tired and thinking about how much further we had to go. My group member and I were both very surprised that we could still have a conversation at 17,000 feet. I was feeling really good but was a little nervous because two of our group members had thrown up already.

We stopped talking around 18,000 feet, and I started to get really tired. I knew I wasn't drinking anywhere near enough because I had accidentally mixed the wrong drink mixes that morning and it tasted terrible. Every time I would drink, I would feel nauseous, so I didn't drink anything which then caused me to get a headache. As we got higher and higher, I could feel the altitude affecting me more. I started to get dizzy and was so exhausted. Some of the guides noticed that I wasn't looking too good and tried to convince me to let them carry my backpack, but I kept saying no, and finally Tendi told them that I could keep it. I was so grateful to him in that moment.

We continued for a few more hours and I was feeling terrible until I was the summit, we were so close. We all started chanting and singing a Swahili song as we got to the summit. In that moment I was so happy and proud of myself.

I hugged my dad with tears in my eyes. We celebrated and they gave us tea as we saw the sun come up.

But then I heard someone say, "OK, everyone put your bags back on. We have one more hour until the summit". I looked around confused and realized that we had reached Stella Point, and we still had an hour to go!

So, I put my bag back on and started hiking again. I started to feel worse, but we only had a little farther to go.

We finally got there, and I sat down immediately.

I put my giant parka on and sat there until we could take a picture with the sign.

After that one of the guides rushed me back down to Stella Point. Once there, I sat down and Tendi told me I needed to drink more water. After I drank more water, he said they he was going to accompany me down.

Tendi grabbed my arm and we started to almost run down.

We then got to a point were the snow turned to sand and we were almost surfing down the sand. At that point I felt a lot better, and my headache had pretty much gone away. I was still a little dizzy, and I still felt very nauseous. We would stop about every ten minutes for me to drink more water. Tendi said that I had to keep drinking, even if it made me nauseous. I ended up throwing up, but Tendi said that I would feel a lot better after, and I did. Then we continued sliding down and got back to camp after only two hours of descent. I relaxed and packed up the rest of my bags before the rest of our team got back.

There were seven people in our group and only two of them didn't get bad altitude sickness (one of them was my dad). Three people threw up and the other two had bad headaches.

I started to feel a lot better after a few hours of relaxing. When everyone got back, we had lunch and then we had to hike two hours down the mountain to the next camp. When we finally got to camp, we played some cards before dinner, then ate, and went to bed after 13 hours of hiking.

I was so exhausted and out of energy that I hadn't even thought about how I had just achieved a huge goal. The summit night was extremely hard, but I got there and that means so much to me.