Voices of RPIA
30
In Our Community
I was perched on a rock at roughly 17,000 ft along with one of my three expedition team members, as well as three guides and porters. Just minutes earlier, I’d thrown up – my first and only symptom of altitude sickness during the entire expedition. Mama Lewis must have known what he was doing because within minutes I had my energy back, and once more, we began to ascend the western face of Kili. We were still squarely in the danger zone – the area prone to rock slides - and needed get past it before sunrise. At 10:30 am, we breached the crater rim. We made our way past Furtwangler Glacier, which sits near the middle of the crater. Hosea, our head guide, told me the glacier today was less than a quarter in size versus ten years ago. We were joined by our two remaining team members a little while later at Crater Camp, ate lunch, and then proceeded to the Summit. The 1 km hike took us an hour and a half. I can’t stress this enough – everything you do at 19,000 ft has to be done slowly. The amount of oxygen up there is less than half of what it is at sea level. At 2:45 pm East Africa Time, on September 18, 2022, we made it to the Summit. We’d done it. After seven long, tiring, cold, and breathtakingly beautiful days, we were standing on the roof of Africa. What compels me to climb mountains? I know there’s nothing up there. Quoting Reinhold Messner, perhaps the greatest mountaineer in the world, “ climbing mountains isn’t fun. ” It’s a place where you learn to cope with pain, because it’s painful. I was cold, tired, my head was pounding, and my legs felt like they were going to give with each step. And yet, I kept moving forward. It’s in these moments that we learn what we’re truly capable of. Our bodies have the ability to push beyond the mental barriers we create for ourselves. I also find that doing an all-consuming activity such as this can be meditative.
Arnav Gupta Associate Portfolio Manager
CLIMBING
“ No, I don’t think I can eat any more right now… ” I said to Mama Lewis, our expedition chef. He smiled, broke off another piece of a Cadbury chocolate bar, and fed it to me by hand. It was roughly 6 am, We had been hiking for two hours – well, hiking is an understatement as it had been a scramble over the giant boulders on the western face of Mt. Kilimanjaro. We had started from Arrow Glacier Camp (~16,100 ft above sea level) at 4 am, and were on track to breach the crater rim (~18,500 ft) sometime between 10-11 am. After that, the plan was to hike to Crater Camp (which is exactly what it sounds – a campsite in the middle of the crater), have lunch, and then push to Uhuru Peak, which at 19,341 ft, was the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, also known as the roof of Africa.
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