Climbing Kilimanjaro - Day 4 - Moir Hut -> Barranco Camp

Hi everyone,

Here is day 4 of our Kilimanjaro climb which is from Moir Hut to Barranco camp.

Day 1 Linky
Day 2 Linky
Day 3 Linky
Video at bottom of post.

Day 4 Statistics

Total Distance 5.3 miles/ 8.5km
Total Time 6hrs 27 mins
Altitude gain - 1688 ft / 514m
Final altitude 13000ft /3970 m

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Mount Meru in the distance

After a pretty good night's sleep, we awoke to another lovely day. We had been so lucky with the weather so far, not a drop of rain - hardly surprising considering we were now above the clouds as you can see in this picture. The terrain from now on was pretty much devoid of all vegetation as the temperature is pretty low overnight and I guess the level of rainfall isn't the highest up here. The mountain in the distance is one of Kili's sister volcanoes, "Mount Meru". Its about 70km away and is approximately 4500 meters high. If you have never experienced walking about cloud level, it is something to behold and the video at the bottom of this post has a bit of footage of clouds rolling into camp.

Charlene and Me in good spirits

The trek now was pretty barren. The higher up you got, the closer you got to the mountain so it seemed to change shape as the base of the mountain disappeared behind you. We had now started to skirt around to the south of the summit , so it was permanently on our left hand side. Today we would climb to 4600m and have our lunch at Lava Tower. This would be the highest we would go before summit night and was good for the acclimatization.

Rocky terrain with Kili to the left and Lava tower ahead

"The Gang" at Lava Tower

After 30 minutes loo break and lunch at Lava Tower we continued the hike around the south-west of the mountain. We started to
descend slightly and came across some water and vegetation. There were a few small streams and some enormous Dendrosenecio Kilimanjari trees. We stopped for the obligatory photo in front of one.

Dendrosenecio Kilimanjari

After a long day trekking we finally arrived at Barranco camp. The sight of the Barranco Wall left us in awe. We would be in for an hour long scramble up the wall tomorrow morning - it was hard enough walking on the flat at this altitude without getting out of breath so I was sure that tomorrow was going to be a real challenge and I wasn't far wrong, it would be one of the most difficult parts of the trek for me. Scrambling up that bad boy with all my camera gear on my back would be bloody hard work.

Thanks for reading, day 5 coming soon..