No Summit out of Sight: Prologue–Chapter 8

I heard only my labored breathing and the crunch of my crampons biting into snow as I traversed a nearly vertical slope on the north face of Mount Everest.

I heard only my labored breathing and the crunch of my crampons biting into snow as I traversed a nearly vertical slope on the north face of Mount Everest.

I looked up and saw a ten-story wall of ice and snow break free from the mountain and explode into an enormous cloud of white that hurtled downward, building higher and higher as it gained speed. Snow dust billowed in the air.

Other kids hardly seemed to notice it in their rush to play soccer or basketball, but I often stopped and stared, mesmerized by those mountains.

“That's a hefty undertaking,” Dad said.

Every year we made a list of the amazing places we wanted to go on vacation. Karen would put them all together on a makeshift spinner made of poster board, and I'd spin an arrow to see where it landed.

“It’s not a mountain with crevasses or steep cliffs. It’s just a long hike. Dad says we won’t even need an ice axe or ropes.”

Interval training means going all out—climbing as fast as you possibly can—for a short period of time, thirty seconds or a full minute, followed by a minute at a normal pace to recover before rocketing up your speed again.

About six weeks later we hiked to a forest-fire outlook in the San Bernardino Mountains, and I started to see a difference in my strength and endurance—all thanks to my daily training. My thighs didn't burn as much and my heart wasn't pounding so hard that I thought it would burst through my ribs.

Tanzania wouldn't give anyone a permit to climb the mountain unless you hired the country's approved porters and guides to lead the climb and carry your equipment up the mountain.

Nairobi was a bustling city filled with honking horns, the smell of roadside trash and diesel fumes, and a constant flow of families, kids, animals, scooters, and workers all on the move.

One roadside village after another was filled with rickety wooden stalls where people sold fruit and vegetables and chickens and goats.

There was a tribe of nomadic cattle herders called the Masai who pierced and stretched their earlobes so big that they hung down to their chins.

We got our papers, crossed the border on foot, and boarded our dilapidated bus again.

Unlike the rest of the Seven Summits, Kili isn't part of a mountain range. It's a dormant volcanic mountain with three volcano cones.

The trail was a single track through a rain forest of rubber trees, giant fig trees, and huge ferns. The foliage was so dense I couldn't see the sun.

I imagined that every vine was the shadow of a snake; every rustle in the bushes, a lizard; every crack of a stick, an animal cruising through the trees.

First there’s the rain forest, with a canopy so dense the sun can hardly penetrate.

Now we were above the forest zone, in a region of giant heather and tough scrub.

Lichen-painted rocks and small shrubs covered the entire ground.

Five other climbers lumbered onto the top behind them, looking pretty ragged.

The trail went on and on, an endless expanse of gray nothing.

Everything was covered with gray volcanic dust as we climbed a barren slope up onto the ridge where our trail merged with the route coming up from an easier route.

Barafu Camp was a ragged, rocky outcropping on the side of an exposed hill.

Kilimanjaro's summit loomed straight ahead of me.

The wind picked up to gale force.

Coming down the mountain, we experienced the same change in vegetation zones, only in the reverse and at a much quicker pace. We didn't have to stop to acclimatize.

From the glacier on the summit we descended through an alpine desert, the foggy moors, the heather zone, and finally the rain forest.

The next morning we had a two-hour walk back to the main gate through the lush rain forest.

We chartered a driver and a safari bus with a removable roof and took a winding road two thousand feet down into the largest volcanic crater in the world.