A climb to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro

Dr. Charles Hertz stands at the breath-taking view at the crater's rim of Mt. Kilimajaro in Tanzania, Africa, the continent's highest peak.

Dr. Charles Hertz’s climb to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in the winter of 2005 started the summer before at a dinner sponsored by Jackson-Madison County General Hospital. He was seated quite by chance next to a man who had recently climbed the mountain with his son.

“For the first time, I realized you could actually get to the top of a high mountain without having a lot of technical skills,” says Dr. Hertz, a gastroenterologist at Medical Specialty Clinic. “I went home that night absolutely transfixed by the idea.”

“I had never been to Africa before,” he says. “I had never climbed a mountain before. And Mt. Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa, and in fact the tallest freestanding mountain in the world.”

After a couple of weeks of research, he signed up with Thomson Safaris, based in Massachusetts and Tanzania, with February 4 set as the date to leave for Africa.

Getting in shape on hospital’s stairway
To make sure he would be in shape for the climb, he did a lot of running, including the Philadelphia Marathon in November, and practiced climbing the hospital’s north tower stairway with a 30-pound backpack, two or three times a week, making a dozen round trips from the basement to the tenth floor each time. “I got some pretty strange looks,” he admitted.

When he arrived in Africa, he joined a small group of other climbers from around the United States. The base of the mountain, where the climb began, was around 5,000 feet above sea level. The route to the top was up the mountain’s western side, via the “Western Breach,” where the rim of the volcano crater had collapsed.

“That route is a little tougher than the more common approaches,” Dr. Hertz said, “but it has the advantage of being longer, and therefore allowing more time to acclimate to the altitude.”

It was slow going in the higher altitudes with the thin oxygen levels, says Dr. Hertz. “You would take a step and rest, take a step and rest.” Dr. Hertz traveled with a backpack filled with essentials like water, video and still cameras, a change of clothing, and a first-aid kit. Porters with the safari company traveled ahead, carrying tents, duffel bags and food, and would set up camp for each night.

From rainforest to lunar-type landscape
Along the way up, the surroundings slowly changed from the rich vegetation of the rainforest at the base of the mountain to a lunar-type landscape at the top, with its volcanic scree and nearly absolute lack of vegetation, Dr. Hertz said. “And the temperature dropped from around 90 in the rain forest to 15 or so at the summit.”

It took six days to reach Mt. Kilimanjaro’s breathtaking crater – 18,700 feet above sea level. “Reaching the crater’s rim was the emotional high point of the journey,” he says. “The climb that day was a tough, steep, six-hour slog, much of it scrambling over rocks. I was just about exhausted when I made it into the crater. But the sudden appearance of all that beauty, just when you thought you couldn’t take another step, was nearly overwhelming. It was all I could do not to burst into tears.”

Surrounded by a view of ice-covered glaciers and near a still smoldering ash pit, the climbers spent the night in the crater, able to eat little and sleep less because of the altitude’s effects. The next morning, they climbed the last 600 feet to the mountain’s peak, arriving around 7:15 a.m., took some photographs to document it, and immediately started back down.

Lions, leopards and giraffes
The trip down the mountain was a steeper, more direct route and took about a day and a half. Before leaving Africa, the group went on safari for a few days, mostly in the Ngorogor Crater, where they saw zebras, wildebeests, gazelles, lions, rhinos, hippos, leopards, elephants, giraffes and other animals. You can get quite close to the animals, said Dr. Hertz.

“They’re so used to the Land Rovers and such that they ignore them as if they were so many rocks. I could have reached out and patted a full grown lion at one point if I wanted to, as he padded by with porcupine quills from his last conquest hanging from his belly.” They also visited a Masai village and Olduvai Gorge, the scene of some of the world’s most important human paleontology.

Would he do it again? “Well,” he said, “maybe as a present for my 65th birthday…”