Kilimanjaro Expedition Dispatch

July 11, 2008 – Leaving Moir Camp

It is 9:30 in the morning on July 11th, our fourth day on the mountain. I am calling you from the Moir Camp at 13,700 feet above sea level. The entire Huffines family team spent the night here last night and woke up looking and feeling remarkably well considering the altitude they were at. Let me emphasize, we didn’t just climb to 13,700 feet yesterday, we climbed to this elevation; went to bed; kept ourselves warm and we are living at this altitude, higher than any point in the state of New Mexico.

Yesterday after we left the Scott Fisher camp, on our hike up here to Moore camp we saw jackal scat. The droppings of wild dogs or jackals who are living in the area. They obviously have been eating a lot of small rodents and field mice because we saw a lot of hair in the jackal scat.

Afterwards, when we got to camp, we saw massive elephant bones, amazingly large bones from an elephant that died years ago. Julius told us that the elephants have been gone from Kilimanjaro since 1975. It was really a reminder that we are here in Africa and in some days time we will be out on a safari where we are going to see all of the great wildlife wonders of Tanzania.

Today we are moving to the Lava Tower, no one on this team has ever gone above the summit of Mount Whitney in California, where they have all been. We are going all of the way to 15,100 feet to the Lava Tower camp tonight. We are working our way up this mountain and we know that our bodies are going to have to adapt to altitude. We will have to take care of ourselves and day to day this team is doing very well. We are having a great time with our Chagga staff. Kilimanjaro continues to be beautiful.

We now have more of the typical clouds high above and below us, different than the clear days we experienced before. Kibo is peeking through the clouds and is beckoning us to come higher.

Here we go! Moving up to Lava Tower.