Kilimanjaro 2008 - Machame Route

Climbing Kilimanjaro along the Machame route

In February 2008 the Brown brothers, Greg & Gary (that's me) joined up with 4 others to trek the Machame Route on Mount Kilimanjaro. I had originally intended to keep a journal of the trek and post it here in the form of a diary. Once on the trail I found that my photographic motivation was, as expected, extremely high while my journalistic motiviation was on the other end of the scale.

An adventure such climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is something one desires to share with others in one form or another. Knowing that the climb was going to be physically and mentally challenging, it was my goal to cover all aspects of getting prepared. In doing so I intended to make it a totally positive experience rather than just somehow getting my "butt" up the "hill" and back down again.

The Kilimanjaro experience begins long before one sets foot in Tanzania. The prepartion itself can and should be an important component of the total adventure.

Many Kilimanjaro trekkers have written and posted wonderful and detailed journals of their Kilimanjaro expeditions (see link page). I won't attempt to duplicate their efforts. What I would like to do though, is to augment the available information with experiences and thoughts that I hadn't encountered during my research, as well as a section on my photography experiences.

I hope that this site will be of some assistance to those following in the "footsteps" of the thousands of trekkers, who annually attempt Kilimanjaro.

On the subject of "footsteps": once the decision has been reached to attempt Kilimanjaro, this is when the first of many footsteps should be made... footsteps to your physician (check-up & vaccinations), footsteps to your local outdoor shop (proper equipment), and many, many more footsteps (preferably with a loaded backpack) to get into proper shape etc...
Do not underestimate the Kilimanjaro experience... It is not a "walk in the park"!

 

Self-Assessment

At the time of this writing I am 50 years young, non-athletic but very far from being a couch potato. At 73kg (160 lbs) and a height of 183cm (6' 0" ft) I don't suppose you could all me overweight. The only sports I've been doing for years are my semi-regular workouts on a stationary bicycle / elliptical trainer. I also go to weekly Yoga courses to help keep my back in shape as well as to maintain flexibility.

After doing well on a stress electrocardiogram test last year I felt it objectively confirmed that my cardiovascular system was not going to let me down.

A day-hike in the Alps a half year prior to Kilimanjaro confirmed that my leg muscles needed a lot of work. The hike itself was great... I just couldn't walk normally for the following 4 days due to the pain in my calf muscles.

What to do ??

Hike, hike & hike some more...

I started out by extending the intensity of my share of the dog walks until the dogs started to think I was nuts... Sorry guys...

I then began adding a lot of flatland hiking around our rural area (always with a 9kg (20 lb) backpack). Living in Germany's Rhein-Main region I was able to add weekend hikes in the nearby Taunus "mountains" just to the northwest of Frankfurt. I feel that these hikes were the most important because of the muscles being used in ascending and descending. From a convienient parking area at 356m (1170 ft) I hiked to the top of the "Altkönig" (798m/2620ft) 8 times and to the top of the "Grosser Feldberg" (878m/2880ft) once, several days before leaving for Tanzania. These peaks are certainly not quite in the same league as "Kili", but it was the best I was able to do here in the Frankfurt region.

All in all I hiked around 300km (190miles) in the 8 weeks prior to leaving for Kilimanjaro. It was also very enjoyable as well !

Preparing in the middle of winter meant I did most of my hiking in very cold, icy and sometimes snowy, windy weather.

Not yet being an experienced hiker these hikes gave me great opportunities to try out all the gear I had needed to purchase. I had never worn polyproplyene hiking clothes before (i.e. underwear, t-shirts, pants etc.). Believe me, you'll never want to wear cotton again !!

I was also able to test my photographic equipment (as well as my gloved and ungloved shutter finger) at freezing temperatures well below -7°C (20°F).

Did all this hiking really prepare me well enough?

YES, physically as well as mentally. My legs ended up holding up very well. The toughest part for my legs though proved to be the descending leg of the route. Your knees take quite a load during the very long continual descents. The obligatory hiking sticks are definitely worth their weight in gold at this point.

Photography

Being an amateur photographer finally getting to go on a "real expedition" I put a good amount of thought into the equipment I wanted to take with. My aim was to be able to take the best quality pictures with the highest level of spontaneity.

Camera

Despite it's size, weight and high price, I was determined to take my Canon EOS 40D DSLR. It's fast and responsive, I know my way around the menus and love the excellent picture quality.

Lens After having read about the sometimes very dusty conditions on Kilimanjaro I decided against taking multiple lenses. Giving some thought on the type of photos I'd like to be taking (i.e. wide angle as well as portrait shots), I was fortunate that my daughter would lend me her EF-S 17-85 IS USM lens. This was a better choice than my EF 24-105 L USM IS for a few reasons. The EF-S 17-85 is much better in the wide angle department, especially considering the 40D's crop factor of 1.6. It also has a weight advantage. I removed my battery grip to save volume and weight and was left with a "mere" 1.5kg (3.3 lbs.) of camera ;-)

Memory Cards

Shooting 10 MPixels pictures in RAW-format I figured on about 70 shots per Gigabyte. Figuring on approximately 1000 shots I decided to bring along 14 GBytes worth of CF cards. As it was I ended up taking around 700 shots and reduced them later at home to around 300 "keepers". (A lot of the shots were exposure bracketed; see below...)

Battery Packs

I had read a lot about people having problems with digital camera batteries, especially under very cold conditions such as on the summit day. I brought along 4 BP-511As just in case. As was to be expected they were great and I only had to replace the 1st battery pack after the third day into the trek. The 2nd battery pack held out extremely well, even on the cold summit day. I never even emptied it on the trip.

Tripod A tripod might've been nice on a couple of occasions. I did bring a very light weight, inexpensive tripod with to Africa. After seeing how full my gear bag had gotten the night before heading out, I decided to leave it back at the hotel. In retrospect it would've helped me get an absolutely fantastic shot of a moonlit Kibo behind the Barranco wall during one of the many nightly "get out of the sack and pee" walks. At 3 a.m. my only thought though was to get back into my sleeping bag. I really wish I had forced myself harder to get back out of the tent with the camera! I could've set it on a rock or something for a long exposure... oh well...

Carrying technique

The Kilimanjaro trek constantly presents you with unbelievably beautiful and bizarre landscapes. If you are serious about getting good shots it is essential to have the camera ready at a moment's notice. It makes no sense packing it away in the backpack. Have it close at hand!

After having recently taken my DSLR on a day hike in the Alps I ended up discovering that keeping a heavy DLSR close at hand is not trivial. With the strap around my neck in a normal fashion I had the camera constantly bouncing off of my stomach. It required at least one dedicated hand to prevent this as well as to protect it during climbing. The "keep hold the camera" hand was of course needed for climbing...

With a little help from "Google" I discovered a simple and effective tip on the internet: With the camera's lens pointed at your stomach, put the neck strap around your neck. Stick one of your arms through the strap and have the camera rest on the side of your hip in a comfortable position. You will find that because of the better center of gravity it doesn't bounce around. To take a picture you just pull your arm out of the strap and use the camera as normal. The only difference being that you have to cross the strap when bringing the viewfinder to your eye. Note: I kept my camera turned on at all times (I had the Auto-Power-Off mode set to 1 minute).

Photograph provided by Roger White

With the above techniques I was able to, upon seeing something worth shooting (which was all the time):
stop, flip the camera up, take the shot, and return the camera to it's hip position in less than 15 seconds.

Miscellaneous

• I brought a polarizing filter along but forgot to use it !#@#%!
• A very useful idea was programming one of the EOS 40D user settings for exposure bracketing in "rapid fire" mode. There were a lot of situations involving a lot of contrast between a very bright sky and the surrounding landscape. I don't own a split neutral density filter, and even if I did there generally wasn't a lot of time to fiddle around.

Miscellaneous Tips

During hotel stay

• Bring earplugs to block out extremely drawn out "dog concerts" during the nights at the hotel. Hey, you're in Africa!
• Bring plenty of $1-bills and keep them handy for various tips.

During trek

• Use your earplugs to block out the voices of the porters as they chill out after you've hit the sack and want (need) to sleep.
• For me the 2 most important body parameters during the 6 days were:
  1). My resting heart-rate (Is my body acclimatizing ?)
  A rule of thumb that I learned says that if your current resting pulse is more than 20% higher than that at home, then your body isn't yet ready to ascend any further.
  My normal resting pulse at home is 56bpm. On some nights as we ascended I went to bed with it up to around 80-85bpm. The next morning it had dropped to e.g. around 65-70bpm signaling that my body is working to acclimatize.
  2). How well hydrated am I ? (urine color)
  Only once did I get a little behind in my H2O-consumption. Be sure to drink, drink, drink!
• Clear goggles on the summit night.
  On our summit night we had a clear night with unusually extreme gusty winds. After several hours of fine dust blowing in our faces I had lost 50% sight in my left eye (like being in a thick fog) with partial loss of my stereoscopic vision. Various others in our party were similarly affected, two of them with more than 50% loss in both eyes. These members were helpless and had to be guided by the arm. Fortunately the effects wore off within hours of returning back to Barafu Camp.

More on water...

I used a 3 liter bladder system for my backpack in an insulated bag and added flavored energy powder.
The system worked great as one is able to constantly sip small amounts of water, which the body can better assimilate. The bladder had 2 drawbacks though:

• You can't readily tell how much water you've been drinking.
• On the cold summit night my drinking tube froze up despite blowing the water back into the bladder after each drink! Luckily I had a small thermos bottle handy just in case.

Responsibility on the Summit night...
(very high altitude and very cold temperatures)

Use your good common sense during the trek, especially during the summit night. Keep an eye on your party members and be responsible. After reading many internet accounts of Kilimanjaro summiting, and partly due to personal experience I believe that many Kilimanjaro trekkers become "summit blind", whereby all else is forgotten. Symptoms of altitude sickness, decreased reasoning skills and even hypothermia are ignored.