Hi everyone,
Here is day 5 of our Kilimanjaro climb which is from Barranco camp to Karanga.
Day 1 Linky
Day 2 Linky
Day 3 Linky
Day 4 Linky
Video at bottom of post.
Day 5 Statistics
- Total Distance 2.8 miles/ 4.6km
- Total Time 4hrs 21 mins
- Altitude gain - 1425 ft / 434m
- Final altitude 13224ft /4030 m
We woke up on the morning of day 5 with one thing on our mind. The Barranco Wall - 1000ft of nearly vertical scrambling that would take at least an hour if not more. This level of exertion at this altitude was going to be a real test. We were up relatively early but there were already people making their way up the wall as you can see in the picture below
It was time to put gloves on (due to the sharp rocks) and put walking poles away and get scrambling. It was just as hard as I thought it was going to be - absolutely exhausting due to the lack of oxygen. I had to stop a number of times just to get my breath back. One blessing was that you had to frequently stop to let porters past who were carrying people's equipment up the mountain. It's amazing how easy they make it look.
One of the more un-nerving parts of this climb is called the "Kissing Rock" which is a point at which you have to squeeze up against a rock with a pretty much vertical drop behind you. All you can do is hold on tight and shuffle along slowly. Thankfully there were no incidents as we went past (well nothing worse than Evance dropping his hat). In total, the climb of the Barranco wall took us 2 hours and was thoroughly exhausting. We had a break at the top with wonderful views and took some cool pictures.
More posing - not balancing very well!!
Rest break over, we continued on to Karanga camp. The trek was tricky, we had to go up and down a couple of really quite large valleys.
At this point we started hearing some bad news. Some climbers who were attempting the western breach (a more dangerous ascent which requires proper climbing equipment), had gotten into trouble and unfortunately one of them had lost their life. This brought home how dangerous this place was; even though we weren't doing the technical climbing, we were miles away from any real support should anything go wrong. It certainly affected the atmosphere all around us. As we arrived at Karanga, the mood matched the weather up there, surrounded in cloud.
However as time went on, the cloud cleared and we managed to get out and about and explore camp a bit before going to bed
Things were starting to get serious - tomorrow would be our last full day before our summit attempt and we needed to get some really good sleep. In less than 30 hours we would be waking up at midnight to make our summit attempt. Scary stuff.
Thanks for reading, day 6 coming soon..
