Kilimanjaro Expedition Dispatch

June 11, 2017 – Entire Austin Adventurists Team Reached the Summit of Kilimanjaro

We woke Sunday morning at High Camp; it’s about 800ft above other normal camps people use on Kilimanjaro. It has become a special place for us for years. We chose the date on this trip to coincide with the full moon and wow was it spectacular, full moon over Kilimanjaro and us at High Camp.

The coming hours were going to prove to be hard, at times overwhelming, exhilarating and completely successful, all 10 team members of the team stood on the summit of Uhuru Peak, or Freedom Peak, the Summit of Kilimanjaro at 3:10pm on Sunday.

First we had to climb up to Kilimanjaro’s top itself, to Stella point on the crater rim that took us about 5 hours 20 minutes. The crew had the dome tent up and a good lunch for us up there; it is pretty weird to be that high on the atmosphere. The team was still hungry, they didn’t want heavy food, but they wanted some hot soup and then we continued on right across the top of Kilimanjaro, Uhuru Peak, and we descended down to Crater camp.

We camped in the crater 18,700ft above sea level. That’s a very serious deal, we were certainly the highest people sleeping in Africa and I expect that we were sleeping higher than anyone in the world. The Himalayan climbing season is over, nobody is in on Aconcagua now. This is a high elevation to go to sleep. Sleep is probably a general’s term but we made it through the night.

This morning after the long night in the crater and the exhaustive climb, we began our descent, all the way to the forest where we are now.

Congratulations to everybody, congratulations to Hannah and Susan for going the extra mile and continued up to the ash pit, the true volcanic ash comb from the last eruption of Kibo. It takes about an hour to get there from high camp, they went out with Thomas, our Guide, and they caught the group for lunch at Millennium camp 13, 000ft in the forest. Now we have the first rain of our trip, as we go back down, through the thicker forest to the thick air at 10,000ft. We have one more day on the mountain, tomorrow, the group has really high spirits as you can imagine from this successful Summit.

Big accomplishment for the Austin Adventurists, congratulations!

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Kilimanjaro summit

Berg Adventures Kilimanjaro crater camp

Life at the crater camp of Kilimanjaro

Kilimanjaro Ash Pit

Full Moon on Kilimanjaro