It is rare that I find myself so completely out of my depth and my element that I cycle through emotions of panic, fear, happiness, joy, and grief within minutes of each other. This isn’t to say that I’m always on top of things. I think it speaks more to the magnitude of how little I stepped out of my comfort zone prior to this. It’s been a few years since I climbed Kilimanjaro, but I think back on that journey from time to time. Usually when I least expect it.
It started in February, on a couch, with a documentary I wasn’t fully paying attention to.
I was trying to figure out what to do for my golden birthday that September. The more I sat with it, the more I knew what I didn’t want: a big party, bottle service, the kind of celebration that evaporates from memory by the following weekend. I wanted an experience.
As I watched, a childhood memory surfaced. When we used to visit India, I’d get excited because we could watch National Geographic, one of the few English channels. I loved it. The scale of the Serengeti, the improbable isolation of the Ngorongoro Crater and the entire ecosystem thriving inside it. I don’t think it was any one thing that captivated me. It was this feeling of being connected to something way bigger than myself. That always stuck. And somewhere in those years of watching, I started saying it out loud: one day I’ll climb Kilimanjaro.
So there I was, years later, still saying one day, watching Kilimanjaro fill the screen again. A trek through every ecology on earth on the way to the roof of Africa. And I just thought: if I never go from one day to today, I’m never going to do anything. That cut through everything. I did some research, picked up my phone, and sent the same text to three or four friends:
“Hey, I feel like you’re one of the few people who would say yes to this, but do you want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro this September?”
One friend replied almost immediately. “Yes. I’m in.” Just like that. The others said it wasn’t the task, it was the timeline. That was enough. We started planning.
The trek was seven days. Five and a half up, one and a half down. There were twelve of us in the group, all from completely different walks of life, different stages. My friend and I made a point to talk to everyone, learn their stories, understand what brought them to this mountain. We had this grand idea of making a documentary out of it. That never materialized, but we have tons of footage: interviews at camp, jokes on the trail, moments of raw encouragement between people who had been strangers days before.
On the three-hour drive from the hotel to the park’s gate, the van was silent. Everyone sealed inside their own nerves. On the final day? Even the most stoic of the British gents was belting out ABBA lyrics with a beer in hand. That’s what seven days on a mountain does to twelve strangers.
We were fortunate to have two doctors in the group. Each evening, they’d walk us through the changes happening inside our bodies as we gained elevation. We’d each take a turn with the pulse oximeter, a small device clipped to your finger that reads your blood oxygen saturation. You needed to maintain a minimum level to be cleared for the next day’s climb.
My readings were low from the start. I was dipping into the low 80s while everyone else hovered comfortably in the low 90s. On day three, I didn’t pass. I asked to try again. The doctors explained what was happening anatomically and coached me to hyperventilate. Deep, exaggerated breaths to force more oxygen into my blood. It worked. And from that point on, my loud, ridiculous breathing became the unofficial metronome of the group. Exhale, exhale, step. Inhale, inhale, step. My body’s limitation had, in some small way, become our shared cadence.
Summit night began at 10:30 PM.
It was freezing in a way that redefined what I thought freezing meant. We wore every layer we had. I carried a CamelBak for hydration. Someone had warned me that at altitude and in those temperatures, the water in the straw would freeze if I didn’t blow it back into the reservoir after each sip. But even before the cold became a factor, drinking was its own fight. Every single step lived inside a rhythm. Exhale, exhale, step, inhale, inhale, step. That’s all you get. Taking a sip meant breaking that cycle, giving up a breath for water instead of oxygen, and then standing there for half a step with empty lungs waiting to breathe again. On a normal trekking day, I was drinking three to five liters. On summit night, by midnight, the whole pack was frozen solid. I was getting water and tea from sherpas during breaks, but my intake fell off a cliff. No pun intended.
Some nights on the trek, we’d wake up with ice forming on the inside of our tent walls, crystallized from the vapor in our own breath. Summit night felt like that, except it was everything. Like the mountain was slowly claiming whatever it could, and all you had to offer was the next step.
We marched on cold, hard shale. Step after step. Switchback after switchback. In the dark, the world shrank to the beam of your headlamp and the boots of the person ahead of you. That’s it. And there were stretches. Long, silent, where the cold and the dark started working on something deeper than the body. My mind started to slip. I found myself thinking about whether I was going to make it. Whether I had done everything I could for my loved ones before I left. Heavy thoughts for heavy steps. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been in that kind of silence, at that kind of elevation, at 2 AM, with your body running on fumes.
But the sherpas would break through it. The Kilimanjaro song. We’d heard it hundreds of times by then, at every camp, every meal, every morning. And every single time on summit night, it hit like adrenaline. Not enough to make the cold go away. Just enough to carry me to 4 AM. Just enough to keep my boots moving.
As the first light began to appear beyond the horizon, we were approaching Stella Point, the final steep ascent, the crucible that the entire night had been building toward. From there to Uhuru Peak, it was gentler. Almost a stroll. We sat down and watched the sunrise over Africa, above the clouds, in a silence that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with awe. I don’t know how else to describe it other than surreal. I’ve stopped trying to find a better word.
When we stood up for the final push to the summit, tears found every one of us. It wasn’t that the group had carried each other. Nobody can climb for you. Each of us was fighting our own private battle with the cold, the altitude, the voice in our heads. But we were all going through that same internal journey together. Side by side. Same darkness. Same shale. Same mountain. And somehow, that was enough.
On the way down, my body started collecting on the debt I’d been ignoring. I started showing signs of severe dehydration. A guide I didn’t even know, from a completely different group, noticed, helped bring me down to a safer elevation, and waited for my water pack to thaw. Some water and some candy. That’s all it took. Then we kept moving.
People ask me sometimes if Kilimanjaro changed me. I get why they ask, but I don’t think of it that way. I don’t reach for it on hard days. I don’t tell myself I climbed Kilimanjaro, so I can handle this. That’s not what it gave me.
What it gave me was evidence. Evidence that life was meant to be lived at that intensity. That you can find beauty and connection without a single modern luxury. Just cold air, hard ground, and the knowledge that the person next to you is carrying the same weight you are. It made me more at peace with a lot of my own life. Not because I conquered something. Because I experienced something fully, without a filter, without really knowing what I was signing up for.
If I could go back and sit with the version of myself on that couch in February, the one watching the documentary, carrying a childhood promise he’d been deferring for years. I wouldn’t warn him about anything. I’d just tell him to book extra days for a safari and to explore Zanzibar before flying home.
The not-knowing was part of the magic. It usually is.