Ep. 1172: Kilimanjaro Debrief - Curt Linville

0:00You're listening to the Adventure Sports Podcast. We talk with adventurers from around the globe to bring you the inspiration and motivation you need to get started in the outdoors or to keep you moving if you're already there. Now here's your host, Kurt Lindville. Hey friends, this is a solo episode this time. I am giving a brief review of the Kilimanjaro It was an amazing even life impacting experience and I'm so excited to share all the details with you. This episode is just sharing some of the highlights of the trip. There will be a future episode where I include the video and the pictures and much more of the details about what it's really like to climb Kilimanjaro but I wanted to give you this initial account while it's still fresh on my mind. It was mind blowing, simply mind blowing.

1:23So how do you measure the success of an expedition? I'm back from Kilimanjaro. It's 12.57 in the morning because I'm jet lagged of course. Kilimanjaro time is about 11 in the morning. I tried hard to stay up until the actual caller out of bedtime but finally decided to take a brief nap at about four o'clock, seven hours later I woke up. I promised that I would record on the trail and try to put together the whole Kilimanjaro experience for you so that you would know what it's like to really climb Kilimanjaro and that episode is yet future. It's going to take me some time to dig through all of the recordings and to put together an episode that begins to do

2:25Kilimanjaro justice. So I thought I would give you just brief updates today. Call it a teaser if you would like but I thought you might want to know what the trip in general was like. So how does one measure success of an expedition? If it's survival well hey I'm here talking to you check that box I succeeded but maybe that's a little bit too broad of a brush right? How does one measure success of an expedition? In mountain biking we would take off on a very hard trail with a lot of techy stuff and at first we thought we were successful because we rode the trail just generally got through it. Later we would take the same trail and we would say can you do it without a dab meaning without putting a foot down? So we would work really hard to ride the trail without even putting a foot down which means you had to clean every feature and you had to get through it without a dab and if you did that then we said we were successful but then it goes on and it says

3:28well what if you could do the trail without a dab and we could do it faster and so we started using Strava to race our own ghosts to see if we could do it faster and faster and faster and faster and then of course you can get to the point of well what about style points? What if I take this jump and it's beautiful and I'm able to do just the right trick in the air before I land and you see how the progression goes with mountain biking and an expedition is kind of more general than that right but how do you measure the success of an expedition? I suppose there are all sorts of metrics that could be used and I don't want to bore you with all those details but I survived not only did I survive but the entire team of 15 climbers survived all of the porters and the guides survived we had an amazing experience you know I heard someone talking about book reviews a while back and he broke down the experience of reading books into seven different categories

4:33talking about if a book was a great book a good book a lousy book you know he had seven different categories his highest category if I remember correctly was there was a time in my life before I had read this book and now I can see a time in my life after which I have read this book it's as if the book was so insightful so impactful so life-altering that it now stands as a mile marker an accomplishment a changing point a right of passage even in your life there was the me before the book and now there's the me after the book for me climbing Kilimanjaro falls into that category there was the Kurt before he climbed Kilimanjaro and there is the Kurt after he climbed Kilimanjaro and it will take me weeks months maybe even years to unpack what all of that means I just know that I went I climbed and somehow I changed

5:43we spent five days scrambling all over Kilimanjaro to acclimate to the altitude and then we had our summit night and we summited this beast of a mountain and hiked down about 7,000 vertical feet before we could put our head on the pillow the next day we did another 7,000 plus vertical feet straight down the mountain to find the gate to the national park or we were picked up and we were finally off of Kilimanjaro it was a surreal experience for me in the beginning I noted that the vegetation was different I didn't know what anything was I didn't recognize a single flower the rocks were different some looked familiar but they were very very different some mix of Kilimanjaro volcanic puke and a lot of sedimentary rocks that appeared to have formed under the sea floor in some ancient epoch the first night on Kilimanjaro I went out of my tent and I looked at the stars and to the north I saw constellations I knew my old friends but I

6:49noticed something shocking Polaris the north star the beacon that had guided me through so many nights in the wilderness was under the horizon not to be seen I knew where it was because I know how to find it but it was gone it was no longer in this guy to guide me and then I looked to the south and what I saw was shocking it was a mystery I did not recognize a single constellation none of my old friends were in the southern sky but I did see I saw the Milky Way galaxy and not the arm that we see in the northern hemisphere which is glorious but in the southern hemisphere we're actually looking into the heart of the Milky Way you can see the arm and the galactic center my mind was kind of blown by that and some wild canine also approached the camp and made some yipping noises this sounded kind of like the stranger noises that a coyote makes but I didn't know what kind of an animal this was and as I went outside to see if I could hear him or see him he vanished

7:54into the night it turns out that this was a jackal and I'd never heard a jackal before so the first day in the first night I was just absorbed just kind of overwhelmed with the foreignness of everything I was a stranger a stranger in a land that I did not know and there were little milestones along the way during the five days of acclimatization one was when we hiked up to over 14,440 feet we stopped right there at 14,439 feet and we drew a line we scratched a line in the dirt on the trail and then we stepped over it why this particular number what's so special about 14,439 feet well that's the height of Mount Albert which is the tallest peak in Colorado which is the highest that those of us on the expedition had ever climbed stepping over that line

8:54was like stepping into brand new territory we were now higher than we could be in Colorado then there was the milestone of stepping over 15,000 feet actually getting into a whole new thousands range of elevation getting into camp each evening having hiked at elevation for six to eight hours also seemed like a bit of an accomplishment I had not spent that much time at high elevation in the past you know it's usually up the mountain and then down the mountain touching into the higher elevations but on this trip we were spending hour after hour after hour at 13,000 14,000 15,000 feet then there were the guides and the porters the Tanzanians who are helping us up the mountain at first I have to admit I was a little bit embarrassed I was embarrassed because they carried heavier loads than we did and they prepared our food and they set up our tents

9:56and they set up our sleeping quarters they even set up a mess hall for us a giant tent where we could all sit together on chairs with a table while we would eat our dinner at were a breakfast and it seemed so strange to me that people were hauling a kitchen they were hauling a restaurant up the mountain for us and I was ashamed I was ashamed because I had always been self-sufficient on all of my climbs and I wondered what they were thinking about us and saying about us behind closed doors or tent flaps as the case may be I thought they must be saying oh we're strong and those westerners are so weak but on the second day all of the porters gathered and they sang for us and they danced and at first I also felt a little bit ashamed because I thought they might be putting on some sort of a fake performance to try to please these western tourists which made me feel like somehow we might be exploiting them but then I began to realize how wrong I was because the smiles on their faces and the joy in their dance was very very authentic they were

11:02having fun for their own sake and they were sharing the joy of their music the joy of their dance the joy of the mountain with us and I realized also as the head guide explained that these people had one of the best jobs in Tanzania carrying their gear and our gear up the mountain was something that was a coveted position and that they were being well paid and also that many of the porters and guides if they weren't working on the mountain with us they would be living on the streets in extreme poverty so their joy was real and I began to understand that they were more like hired employees who really loved their job and I began to understand that climbing this mountain Kilimanjaro it's a team effort and it's a partnership it's a partnership between those local people who have trained literally for years to have the strength to climb the mountain

12:04and to carry heavier loads and with the people that have come to climb who don't know what to expect and who may not be in the condition to actually get up a mountain this steep this tall into the air that thin these guides and porters became our friends during the week we learned their names they learned ours we asked about their families we learned about what it's like to live in Tanzania and they learned more about what it's like to grow up and live in the west it was a fascinating cultural exchange and I grew very fond of many of the people that were helping us climb Kilimanjaro though I may not see them again I consider them close friends but I ask again how do you measure the success of an expedition if success requires climbing the mountain alone with no help then we failed when we stepped on the bus that drove us up the

13:05lower steps of the mountain because the bus helped us if success depends on doing it alone carrying all of your own gear and mastering the trails and the routes without any help then and we failed from the beginning because we had porters and guides that were helping us on the mountain but if success is measured in the sense of the team effort how we all work together to accomplish a really difficult hard thing then as a team we all succeeded a football team is not just a quarterback a football team is not just the center or the full back or the half back or the tight end a football team is a team that works together to win and I realized that Kilimanjaro is not an individual effort it's actually too big for that yes people with the right training and gear and expertise and experience could climb Kilimanjaro solo if they were allowed but you are required to hire the porters and the guides and that's probably wise it keeps people from getting

14:09hurt on a mountain that could do very real harm so I had to accept that Kilimanjaro was a team effort not only because of these wonderful happy supportive joyful guides and porters that were helping us along our way but also because there were 15 of us that had come to climb Kilimanjaro from all over the world and we all wanted to do it together for a common cause we had three people from South Africa we had two people from the United Kingdom we had people from Texas a guy from Oklahoma several from Colorado and we had convened in Tanzania to meet each other some of us for the very first time and to do a big and very difficult thing together as a team I said in an earlier episode that the youngest man on the team was I believe 45 and the oldest was 72 or something like that well the team had changed a little bit some of the younger generation

15:10had joined so we had three young men with us and the rest were in their 40s 50s 60s and 70s but this was an older group of men by and large and many of the men there had never climbed a mountain before Kilimanjaro was their first attempt at getting up a mountain and they chose the roof of Africa the highest peak in Africa and the whole continent it's also the highest free standing mountain in the world meaning it's not part of a mountain range it's a free standing mountain and it's about the third or fourth most prominent peak on earth they chose that to learn how to climb mountains so how do you measure the success of an expedition if its friendships gained people met people love bonds formed learning about other people's lives then this was a smashing success my fellow climbers became very very close friends and I'm so thankful for having known them on Kilimanjaro but we weren't climbing Kilimanjaro just for our own personal satisfaction we

16:16were doing it for a common cause we see hope we see hope is a NGO that helps children and entire communities in rural Africa to have the opportunity for better lives and it's not by giving handouts quite to the contrary they provide training and skills empower the local people to succeed and to pull themselves out of difficult situations into lives of opportunity and success so how do we measure the success of the expedition when it comes to we see hope and the amount of money that we had decided to raise you may recall that we rounded up to 20,000 feet and said that each climber would attempt to raise 20,000 dollars a dollar a foot to help the people the children in Africa that we see hope reaches out to all the time and as of today the fundraising is not over but as of today we have raised $158,000 that's not to $300,000 that was the goal but $158,000 is amazing

17:29and will make a vast positive impact for children that are living without parents that are for children that are living on the streets for children that can now be nourished both in body soul and intellect as they get an education and they get self-worth and they get physical nourishment to fuel their success is that how we should measure the success of the expedition perhaps the success of an expedition is better measured by the comeback stories by the people who had life circumstances that may have kept them from ever climbing again and there were several of these comeback stories in our group Gino had had an extreme traumatic brain injury that could have taken his life yet he recovered from that to climb Kilimanjaro Nick had a foot that had been crushed and the doctors wanted to amputate it but Nick had talked them into surgery after surgery after

18:30surgery to try to put it back together and Nick was climbing on his foot that was full of titanium and there were still bones out of place pointing in the wrong direction I was climbing on a leg that had been mostly paralyzed for a year and I was also climbing on a foot that had been injured and it kept me from being active on my feet for over two years come to find out many in the group had suffered extreme concussions that they had to recover from there are other injuries that I'm sure they didn't even share and such as life you don't get through this life unscathed it's not about getting through this life without any hardships it's about overcoming the hardships that are presented so if we measure the success of the expedition based on the comeback stories then it was a smashing success one more measurement might be what percentage of the group actually summited and amazingly enough this rag tag collection of people with varying degrees of experience most of us actually older than the average people that would attempt such a mountain 100% of us

19:36summited the lead guide told us later that that was very rare that it's not expected for a group that size to have a hundred percent success much less a group as old as we were but we were determined we were supporting each other and we had a big enough why have you ever gone through all the hassles of getting on the plane security luggage long waits at the airport all that kind of stuff and then when you finally arrive at your destination not only are you worn out but you also might feel a little bit disconnected I know that I do when I hop scotch around the planet on a plane that's one of the reasons why I love the great American road trips where you get to drive from one place to another and connect all of those dots you get to experience the changes in the terrain and the weather and the people in the communities this is one reason that I am excited

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21:44for a trip that actually feels like a break head to outdoorsy dot com outdoorsy is currently running a special promotion for listeners use the promo code ASP at checkout to take advantage of this limited time offer that's outdoorsy dot com promo code ASP on a personal level I think I had been expecting to measure my success on a few metrics for one I wanted to climb the mountain without taking any diamox diamox is a medication that helps to ward off the altitude sickness that can incapacitate people at such elevations for two I wanted to climb the mountain carrying my own pack without extensive help being necessary I didn't want someone to lift me up the mountain or to carry my pack for me and I think to be really candid I also wanted to be able to help others around me get up the mountain to encourage them as I went looking back on that all of these smacked

22:47of a little bit of pride the reality was that I was on a team it was a team effort from the beginning and I needed to recognize that as a team we would succeed or fail together let me tell you what happened on summit night parties climb at night to the summit of Kilimanjaro for several reasons one of them simply being weather as the sun heats the air around Kilimanjaro and it begins to rise the air pressure drops in these rising masses of air and they form clouds and storms that torment the peak during the day so climbing at night means that you can summit before the clouds appear you can see the views you can escape the weather and you get to see the sunrise over Africa from over 19,000 feet above sea level which of course is a remarkable experience so we hiked into the the high camp and then we dropped off some gear and did an acclimatization hike even higher up to about 16,000 feet and then we came back down we ate some food and then we tucked

23:53ourselves in for an app kind of late afternoon and we got up at 10 o'clock at night after our rest to start the climb up Kilimanjaro we ate more food we put on our gear and we started climbing sometime around 11 30 at night we proceeded to climb through the night and it was very cold the at the lower elevations the wind was blowing at probably 20 knots and the temperatures were below freezing as we continued to climb deeper into the wee hours of the morning into higher and higher elevations the temperatures plummeted colder and colder and colder and the wind gusts increased until they were around 40 knots based on how it felt compared to riding my motorcycle it was very dark and we had on headlamps and we were marching in a tight line taking baby steps just one tiny step after the other at a moderately slow pace just slowly slowly slowly ascending the mountain

24:54and at first it seemed frustrating to be moving so slowly but soon as we got to higher elevations it became impossible to go any faster and somewhere between 17 and 18,000 feet the guides began singing songs in Swahili and making loud noises to try to keep the hikers awake they knew what happened to hikers who were exhausted both physically from lack of sleep and also physically from the exertion of climbing but also impacted by the thin thin air people become hypoxic and they literally fall asleep on their feet as they climb so the guides were yelling and singing and cheering us on to try to keep everyone awake and engaged in the in the climb and this is when something very strange happened to me that I have difficulty explaining all of the singing and the hooping and the hollering and the cheering sounded like it was at the end of a very long tunnel even though the

25:55guides were right beside me in addition to that I began to feel hypnotized by the headlamps and by the stepping and the flashing of light and the swinging back and forth of backpacks but even more strangely I began to hallucinate a little bit and it probably is because I had entered into some sort of a dream state we've all had the dream where we're trying to run but we can't run our limbs won't work we feel like we're stuck in molasses or concrete and just can't move I started dreaming that my muscles were doing that very thing while climbing up the mountain although I was still in line step after step walking up this mountain I was having these sorts of hallucinations I think part of the reason for this is that at the previous break that we had taken and these breaks are very very short I had run off to go use the restroom and I came back and I wanted to get pictures of all the climbers in their headlamps and so I did a little bit of recording and photography but then the group started gearing up and moving off again and I had not

26:58had any food I had not had any water and it was so difficult to drink water while climbing because every single step was a major exertion even reaching up to adjust my cap or my hood would leave me breathless for several steps it was amazing how the slightest change in the rhythm would cause you to no longer be able to get enough oxygen so the group started moving again and I grabbed my hydration pack hose and I tried to suck a few gulps of water before I started going up the mountain and I found that the hose had frozen there was no water to be had so I decided I would just have to wait until the next stop when I could dig in my pack for some water in a bite of food but by the time the next stop came I was already hallucinating when the group stopped at about 18,000 feet I found one of the guides and said that I needed water and together we dug through my pack also they realized that I was bonking hard and so Nema one of the lady guides on the trip found some powdered

28:03sugar I suspected also had some electrolytes in it and she dumped it in my water bottle and shook it up and then she had me shoot about half of that water bottle full of this sugary solution because I knew that I had been hallucinating I was concerned that I could be starting to have cerebral edema swelling in the brain that can cause confusion so I asked for some dialogues I did not want to risk swelling in my brain that could be very very dangerous the lead guide asked me questions about how much dialogues I had had which was completely zero I'd never taken it before in my life and when he realized that I had had no dialogues then he gave me a dose to take by this point the rest of the team had their packs on and they were starting to move again and I was trying to get my pack on in a hurry so that I could keep up and not be left behind I took my first several steps and then found myself gasping for air I wasn't in good form

29:04there was no strength left in my limbs my feet didn't want to move I couldn't get my breath and another one of the guides gamma came to my rescue he took my pack off of me through it on top of the pack that he was already carrying and told me to start marching on and of course that caused us to be several steps behind our group other groups had intermixed with hours and I just started trudging up the mountain not really knowing still where I was who I was or what I was doing I think I was actually still in a dream state I found myself trying to say words out loud just so I could form words with my mouth because that would mean I was conscious but like trying to cry out in a dream when you can't make a sound I also couldn't get words to form in my mouth but several minutes later the sugar water started to have its impact I got a little bit more strength I started breathing more easily and I became slightly more alert at 19,000 feet we hit

30:04the shoulder of the mountain at Stella point and there was a bright glow in the east the sun was about to rise and the glow was encouraging and I started to actually wake up I was still behind our group so I started marching forward a little bit more quickly and I caught our group and actually passed our group not really realizing what I was doing until the lead guide told me to drop back and get back in line it was around this time that I realized that I didn't have my pack and so I turned around and I marched backwards down the mountain until I found Gamma and I took my pack from him and I said I can carry it I want to carry it to the summit and so I put my pack back on and then turned around and started trying to catch my group again and it took some while but I did catch the group and fell back in line and we summited together even though I was at the summit and the sun was rising and it was one of the most glorious experiences of my life I couldn't believe the beauty around me the camaraderie people hugging and pounding on backs there were high

31:09fives all around huge smiles and congratulations the wind was still frigid and blowing fiercely and I confessed that my tear drops were freezing as they trickled down my face but I had such a mix of emotions I had gone somewhere mentally that I had never been before I was dreaming as I climbed and the hallucinations left me unsettled and then the realization that Gamma had taken my pack he had climbed probably around a thousand vertical feet with my load I felt like I had both succeeded in something incredibly hard and also at the same time I had failed because Gamma this strong strong man had carried my load for me our time on the summit was fairly brief we took some pictures we looked around at the views we watched the sunrise over the glaciers that are still on Kilimanjaro but then I noticed that two of my teammates were having some medical issues

32:11they were wearing oxygen and panting and we knew it was time to get them off the mountain there are a lot more details to that story which I may share part of later but suffice it to say that we descended the mountain quickly and now the sun was up and we dropped 4,000 feet to get back to our high camp one of our team was evacuated by a helicopter from this point to try to get to lower elevation quickly and there was another group of our team that opted to pay for a helicopter to expedite getting on down the mountain it was a very intense and very difficult climb so we were back at our tents we were back at camp and all we wanted to do was maybe grab a bite of food and collapse on our beds and go to sleep but wisely the guide said no no naps no one was allowed to sleep we had to quickly eat some food gear up and continue the descent while it seemed pretty

33:12harsh they wouldn't let us rest they made us continue on down later looking on it I realized that our camp was at 15,500 feet and if people had developed any cerebral edema climbing the mountain going to sleep at that remaining high altitude could be lethal they may never wake up so the guides made us continue marching down the mountain another 3,000 feet one thing that I had not mentioned before is that twice a day during the entire trip they had taken our blood oxygen levels as well as our heart rates and recorded them they had also recorded other medical stats about us to make sure that everyone was acclimating well and that we would be strong enough for the hike when we finally arrived at our lower camp around 12,000 feet then they again did the medical checks to make sure that everyone was well well those of us who are still on the mountain finally we got to rest I took pictures of the distance summit before I laid down to recover because I was amazed at how far we had come from

34:18the summit now three days later I'm back in Colorado and reflecting on the experience it still seems surreal there are many lessons I have yet to realize one being that it was a team effort and that pride has no place on the mountain another is how blessed and wonderful how grateful I am for having had the opportunity to climb this beast of a mountain to fulfill a lifelong dream with new friends that I made both Tanzanian and others who were in our climbing party to be candid I feel now that the mountain haunts me just a little bit it haunts me to remember and to explore the experience in my memory it it calls to me to understand and to attempt to grasp what this experience really means everyone who climbs Kilimanjaro has a personal experience there's no escaping that as we discuss the experience among ourselves the members of the

35:22expedition all had slightly different accounts but they agreed it was the hardest thing that they had ever done I was kind of surprised by that honestly I was a little surprised because the seven summits are tough and some believe that Kilimanjaro might be the easiest of the seven if Kilimanjaro is this difficult what are the others like and I confess as the host of the adventure sports podcast I've interviewed a lot of people about their climbs up Everest or the seven summits and while I always try to be enthusiastic about what they have accomplished the stories begin to be familiar because I had heard similar stories so many times I think until I climbed Kilimanjaro I didn't understand the magnitude of the accomplishments it's true that we must walk a mile and another shoes to begin to understand their perspectives and now I have walked that mile of Kilimanjaro and I have a fresh appreciation for the people that have climbed bigger peaks in harder

36:29conditions my hat is off to you all of you who have done the hard things there are many more details to share and stories that need to be told I also captured a lot of video and pictures which I'm going to put together in a recap video so you can see the experience as well as just hearing me talk about it that will be the full episode on Kilimanjaro that I will release at some point in the future but I wanted to give you the brief summary update this time and even now I took over 30 minutes to tell the brief side of the story it was an amazing experience but I look forward to introducing you to the team of climbers making it possible for you to hear the music to see the smiling faces to meet the members of the team to see the views from the top of Kilimanjaro all of this is yet to come so please stay tuned for that but thank you today for listening in on the brief version of the story and until the next show get out there and have some fun