Kilimanjaro Day 5: The Midnight Slog, The Boulder Scramble, and the Trough of Despair
The final test of the mountain is a 14-plus hour trial of midnight slogging, loose scree, boulder scrambles, and extreme altitude exhaustion. With zero sleep, dwindling energy reserves, and a complete lack of chemical shortcuts, Day 5 pushes mind and body to the absolute brink before the triumphant reward of sunrise on the crater rim.
Kilimanjaro Day 5: Kibo Huts to Uhuru Peak (Summit!) then back down to Horombo Huts
Starting Altitude: 4,703m (Kibo Huts)
Summit Altitude: 5,895m (Uhuru Peak)
Ending Altitude: 3,720m (Horombo Huts)
Time On Feet: 14+ agonizing, ridiculous hours
Terrain: Near-vertical frozen shale, trackless boulder fields, high-altitude crater rims, and endless knee-shattering scree.
At 11:00 PM, the laying on our backs wide awake pretending to sleep ended. Fred and Juma were knocking on the wooden door of our chilly cabin. Still functioning on absolutely zero sleep, Ben and I dragged ourselves out of our bags. We completely bypassed the breakfast porridge, opting instead for a classy summit meal of a few bites of Kendal Mint Cake and a Pop-Tart.
At midnight, we stepped out into the pitch-black abyss, keen to get going but cautious of what was ahead. The only redeeming feature of the day was that it was pitch black so we were living in blissful ignorance of the route ahead and just how vicious it was.
The Endless Zig-Zag
The first section was a long, unrelenting crawl up a steep wall of shale and loose volcanic debris. Your headtorch illuminates exactly three feet of dirt in front of your boots, and that little patch of light becomes your entire world.
Twenty minutes in, Juma abruptly stopped and pointed into the dark.
"Look," he whispered. "Jackal."
Two piercing yellow beads of light caught the glare of our torches from beneath a massive rock, staring at us before slipping away into the freeze. It is little moments like this that break up the monotony of the pain and I was grateful to our guides for finding things to make just walking for hours each day more interesting.
The sky was completely cloudless, pinned with millions of stars. Juma set a pace that was mind-bendingly slow, but he’d warned us beforehand that this was entirely for our benefit. He knew we were completely depleted, sleep-deprived, and running on empty calories, if we went any quicker we would not make it to the top.
Our little merry band of four people were entirely alone on the mountain face until an hour later, when two lone headlights appeared below us. It was Hannah and her guide. Operating like an absolute machine, she powered right past us with a cheery greeting. We cheered her on, watched her headlight rapidly shrink into the distance, and then put our heads right back down to greet our own patches of light on the scree floor.
The shale footing was soul-destroying. Every time you took one step forward, your boot would slide two steps backward in the loose dirt. The further away Hannah’s light got, we could see just how steep the climb was going to get and it appeared to be near vertical where Hannah was.
By 3:00 AM, the cold was biting deep. We stopped for an emergency triage of Pop-Tarts, water, and Maoam sweets, desperately shoving calories into our faces. The second you stopped moving, the freeze began to penetrate your layers, and Fred and Juma were noticeably keen to keep us moving. They could tell the wheels were starting to wobble.
Our pace dropped further.
"Ben, sync your breathing with your stride," I panted, trying to get him into a rhythmic flow. "Poles, feet, breathe. It makes the time pass quicker and makes it feel easier" He gave a weary nod and thanked me as the rhythm took over.
An hour later, Ben began to visibly sway and wobble on the path. Fred immediately moved in to take his backpack, but Ben flatly refused out of pure, stubborn British pride.
"Ben," I intervened, using my best no-nonsense voice. "Let him take the bag for ten minutes so you can recover. It’s okay to accept help. That is literally why Juma and Fred are here."
Ben finally relented and I thanked Fred and we carried on. A few swigs of water and another hit of Maoam sugar later, we found a slow rhythm. Shortly after, the girls from the Drama Crew caught up and overtook us. We swapped breathless well wishes, telling them we'd see them at the top, though at that specific moment, I was genuinely starting to question if "the top" was a physical reality or just a hallucination.
The Boulder Scramble & The Dying Torch
Four hours into the climb, I was lifting my head every twenty minutes to take a gulp of our treated death water, searching the darkness above for a lack of headtorches. I was desperately praying the lights ahead would disappear over the lip of the climb to signal the end of this soul destroying climb, but they just kept flickering high above us, going further up and up.
"I wish Hannah’s headtorch would piss off," Ben woefully chuckled into his jacket.
I couldn't help but agree.
Funnily enough, our legs didn't actually ache that much. The trekking poles were doing their work, dividing the sheer exhaustion between our arms and legs and saving our core stability on the unstable earth. I paused for a split second to look backward. The world was spread out beneath us like a map, with the lights of Kenya flickering on one side and Tanzania on the other. It was beautiful and in moments like this you wish you were not doing a challenge and could just sit and chill to absorb it all.
Five hours in, the scree earth vanished entirely. We were suddenly met with massive, unrelenting boulders, taller than us, piled on top of each other for as far as the eye could see with our head torches. Juma scrambled up first, peering over the first boulders.
"My friends, be very careful," Juma warned. "We have to climb the last bit and there are loose rocks."
I looked at the vertical jumble of stone.
"So we are bouldering up a mountain by headtorch now," I muttered, laughing at the sheer absurdity of it.
Ben was too far gone to respond but did not look overly happy at the situation we were in.
I found it a bit funny. Riding semi-feral horses across the wild plains of Mongolia during the Mongol Derby is one thing, but clinging to the side of loose boulders on a sheer drop with flickering headtorches is a whole different brand of ridiculous.
“I will definitely chalk this up as one of my finest ideas,” I thought.
And then, right on cue, my headtorch battery died. Complete darkness.
What followed was thirty minutes of pure, unadulterated chaos. We were hopping from boulder to boulder in the dark with three headtorches between four of us now, trying to dodge deep gaps between the rocks and scrambling up rounded edges that were impossible to grip onto.
"This is not very safe," Ben laughed nervously at one point, pushing a loose rock with his boot. "Any of these could fall at any moment."
I thanked our lucky stars that we could not see just how steep and sudden the drop below us was.
Juma would step on a boulder, feel it give way slightly, and immediately alter his route. There was no established trail, we were entirely at the mercy of wherever Juma’s intuition took us.
After thirty minutes of rock climbing, I looked up. The flickering lights were gone, just pure, black sky. "We’re nearly there!" I yelled with glee. "Look, Ben! Hannah’s headtorch is gone!"
The Crater Rim at Sunrise
We hauled ourselves over the final blocks of stone and collapsed onto a flat expanse of volcanic earth just as a magnificent, blood-red band of sunrise began to bleed across the horizon.
We sat down in the freezing air, Ben slowly nibbling on a Pop-Tart and a Maoam. I couldn't find my sweets in my layers, so I choked down a piece of Kendal Mint Cake and filmed a quick video to prove we were still breathing.
"How are you feeling?" I asked him.
"So happy we are here," he whispered, completely drained.
“Not regretting your choice of fiancé yet then?” I said half worrying about the answer!
“Never, but I am not doing another one of these” he smiled
"My friends," Fred announced, pointing across the vast, yawning crater toward a distant shadow on the opposite side. "We have 200m left to climb up. About one to two hours. There is the summit."
I looked at the distant peak and laughed.
"What!? that is forever away! We’d best get moving!"
The path along the crater rim was spectacular but incredibly sketchy. It was narrow, entirely covered in snow, and perched precariously on the mountain edge. Beneath the snow lay loose, unstable rocks that would instantly skitter and vanish down into the sheer drop of the crater if you stepped incorrectly.
The sun was fully rising now, casting a golden light over the glaciers. People always say you need to be at the summit sign for sunrise, but walking the crater rim while the sun broke over Africa was easily one of the most incredible, surreal things I’ve ever experienced. I felt like a genuine old-school explorer.
Ben was at the front, essentially operating on muscle memory alone. The past four days of zero sleep, no food, and active dysentery were culminating in a massive physical crash. I was on absolute red alert behind him, watching his foot placement like a hawk to ensure he didn't slide into the crater.
"Take your time, Ben," I cooed supportively. "We have all the time in the world. There is no rush." Although I was running out of sugar snacks quickly, I made a mental note to keep whatever I had left behind for Ben, I would be fine.
As we pushed on there were times where I questioned if we would make the final 200m. There were stumbles from both of us and a lot of swaying from Ben, I was seriously concerned and wondered where the stop point of it all should be.
“Ben, do you need us to go back down? We can go back down if you need, we have basically done it” I reassured.
No answer but a gruff noise and a head shake. I am stubborn and knew I would push through until I passed out (I do not advise this of anyone!) but just because I would do that did not mean I wanted Ben to. However, we carried on, two stubborn humans willing to get it all over and done with as quickly as possible whilst moving at 1mph.
As we pushed up the final 100 meters, we crossed paths with Hannah on her way down. Her and I had a good laugh about how much Ben and I had wanted to violently extinguish her headtorch a few hours prior. She looked incredibly fresh, and it was right there that we discovered a small detail… the other tourists on the trail was using altitude sickness prevention medication. We were not. We were doing Kilimanjaro entirely on hard mode. Whoops.
Reaching Uhuru Peak and the Brutal Descent of the Walking Dead
The final push to the summimt sign was brutal. My breathing was completely shot, short, sharp, panicked gasps of thin air. Ben was visibly swaying. The guides were incredible, stepping in to keep our morale alive as Ben aggressively munched on Maoams for survival.
Day 1 and Day 2 had made me naive. I had honestly thought our altitude chamber training back home would make us completely invincible out here. It turns out it was fabulous training up to 3000m and we did indeed hardly feel the altitude on this trip until after 3000m. However, after 3100m it all hits you like a ton of bricks anyway. I did think how bad we would have felt if we had not done the training, to be honest I know I would have likely not made it after my Nepal experience at 4300m.
At fifty meters out from the summit post, the trail flattens into a magnificent, snowy expanse with a view of ancient glaciers, volcanic cones, and the vast plains of Kenya and Tanzania stretching out far below a cloudless sky. We were blessed with a clear day and it was utterly flawless.
"So about this rain?" I grinned at Juma. He offered me a shrug and a laugh.
We reached the iconic Uhuru Peak sign, snapped our photos, and then Ben looked at me with genuine urgency.
"We need to start going down right now," he said. "I’ve run out of Maoams and I’m worried about getting back down with no food. I do not feel good"
He was entirely right to worry. We had a five-hour knee-crushing descent ahead of us just to get back to Kibo Hut and then another 15km hike to get to Horombo huts for the night. He had exactly five sweets left, and I had a half a block of Kendal Mint Cake for him. This was going to be tricky to manage without someone passing out from exhaustion.
The Descent of the Walking Dead
As we began the long walk down through the biting cold, my adrenaline spiked into emergency mode. Ben was no longer walking in a straight line at any point. He was completely fatigued, veering sideways, and his speech was starting to slur from sheer, unadulterated exhaustion.
"Ben, are you okay?" I barked in bossy monitoring mode.
He nodded.
"You are not walking in a straight line, do you know this?"
No response.
I immediately began force-feeding him my remaining mint cake, stuffing sugar down his throat to keep his system from entirely shutting down. The only saving grace was that dropping the first 100 meters of altitude immediately made breathing feel noticeably easier, but it wasn't solving Ben's complete lack of energy reserves.
An hour into the descent, as we navigated the narrow crater rim path back toward the boulder field, even Fred and Juma became visibly worried. Ben miss stepped twice, nearly sliding off the edge of the path and off the mountain face, he sat down where he fell in the snow, exhausted. I shoved the last of my mint cake into his mouth.
"Thank you," he managed a weak smile.
"Love you lots, please let’s just get down safely, okay? If you need to rest, rest. But I am officially out of food now... I think I left my spare Maoams in the hut. Sorry." I replied with caution
Ben stopped, looking at me with a glint of his usual humour. "Emmelia of the Potts. How could you forget the sweets?!" he husked out through shallow breathes.
Once Ben was rested and back on his feet we slowly stalked back down to the massive boulder field we had scrambled up in the dark a few hours prior. Looking at it in the full light of day was a bit scary.
"Christ, this is actually very dangerous!" I laughed nervously. "I am so glad we did this in the dark so we could not see just how sheer those drops were!" One loose rock or a single misplaced step would send you tumbling thousands of meters down a sheer cliff face.
Scree Surfing
Eventually, we hit the massive scree slope and I absolutely love this stuff. From my ultra-marathon running, I’m used to running down loose shale and get a massive kick out of "scree surfing." Ben, however, despises it and it instantly triggered flashbacks of his agonised knees on Mount Fuji.
However, his training paid off and he dealt with the unstable descent incredibly well this time. I walked beside him, coaching his foot placement.
"Trust your boots, Ben. Lean into your heels a bit and let yourself slide deliberately without resisting."
He got the hang of it, and our pace picked up. With the air thickening every step we slid down, morale started to rise despite the exhaustion continuing to dwindle.
"Christ, this is hard on the legs!" Ben shouted after some time of practicing his scree skiing. He looked like he was starting to enjoy himself and the life in him now was an improvement from the top of the crater rim.
"Yep! We’ve been skiing down a volcano for an hour now, it's a massive quad workout!" I grinned, loving every second of it.
Fred and Juma joined in, sliding down the mountain face alongside us.
Eventually, the quad burn caught up and the pace slowed to a crawl. To pass the time, Juma pointed out the shiny, deep purple stones mixed into the volcanic dirt. He explained that it was compressed lava that could be polished into a beautiful rock known locally as "Burnt Tanzanite." Naturally, I spent the rest of the descent entirely distracted, hunting for purple rocks to smuggle home in my pockets.
Halfway down the scree slide, we sat down for a brief rest and started to peel off our layers. Within minutes, massive mountain eagles began circling directly above us. Fred explained that this is how the mountain rescue teams locate collapsed hikers. If the birds start circling, it means a body is lying flat on the earth for too long. We promptly stood back up, peeled off some layers and kept moving in the now rather warm heat.
The Miracle That Is Squash
We finally trundled into Kibo Camp terratory completely battered. We could see Martin in the distance on the final stage of the scree descent, he was waiting at the bottom of the slope, wearing his signature beaming smile, flanked by a couple of the porters to welcome us back.
"Welcome back!" Martin cheered. "Here."
He poured us each a cup of ice cold, bright orange squash. We hugged Martin and the porters, high fived Fred and Juma, and collapsed onto the steps outside our hut, slowly sipping the squash to ensure our stomachs didn't instantly reject it.
Ben was smiling with a light behind his eyes again and I knew we were okay and everything would be easy from this moment on, I could stop worrying.
Then, the second the adrenaline drained from my system and my brain realised we were safe... everything hit me at once in the space of the next ten minutes.
"My friends, we leave after lunch for Horombo Huts where we stay tonight," Fred announced cheerfully. "One hour, then we walk."
I looked at Ben “That is quite a long way, how are you feeling?"
"Tired, but it's all downhill!" Ben grinned. I was immensely relieved to see him back to life, but my own body was about to enter a not so happy place.
Martin brought out a lunch of heavy, stodgy carbohydrates. Ben had found some of his appetite and was slowly munching away. The thought of food still made me gag.
"It’s okay, my body won't shut down just yet," I reassured Ben as he tried to get me to eat. "I’ll eat tonight, but right now I just need sleep more than anything."
The Decline (in more ways than one!)
We repacked our gear and set off for the three hour march back down through the alpine desert. We started off in fantastic spirits, celebrating the morning’s success. It was only just really sinking in that we had done it.
Then, exactly thirty minutes away from our previous day's lunch stop, a familiar, terrifying rumble echoed from my midsection. Water in water out was about to resume again.
"I need to go. Right now," I gasped, frantically clutching Ben’s arm. I spun around in a circle, but as previously established, the alpine desert is a barren, flat wasteland. No bushes, no boulders, no privacy.
"I need those toilets at the lunch stop down the hill. I am running ahead."
I marched and ran like a woman possessed. I rounded the rolling hill ridges expecting to see the solitary toilet units, only to find more massive hill ridges up ahead. I could have wept.
“Nooooo, I thought, I am literally about to poo myself on Kilimanjaro”.
But my mother did not raise someone who poos themselves in a desert, so I deployed every remaining ounce of oxygen and sprinted over the final ridge, bursting into the toilet block with half a second to spare.
What followed was pure, volcanic, high-velocity anal eruptions.
When I finally emerged, the three men were calmly basking in the sun outside. I looked at Juma. "So... where is this rain then?"
Juma just frowned and gave an unbothered shrug and a cheeky smile.
"You okay?" Ben asked.
"Urm, no, not really. I think I am officially 24 hours behind you on the stomach crisis situation, but I made it." The final remnants of relationship mystery were thoroughly decimated right there.
"Friends, we have one hour to the huts, then food and sleep," Fred smiled.
The Walking Dead
It was the final hour of the day to Horombo huts where I had serious issues. The roles reversed and it was Ben’s turn to play saviour.
We walked through the sweltering afternoon heat, navigating the rocky riverbed paths we now knew intimately. But without any adrenaline left in my tank, and no more worrying about Ben, my body realised it was completely running on empty and actively began shutting down.
My eyelids became so heavy they would close mid stride. I would find myself nodding off while walking, only to snap back awake when my boot struck a loose rock. My stomach was churning and aching so violently that standard period pains felt like an angels kiss. My head was pounding, and I was swaying back and forth and side to side as if I had been on a night on the town. Every few minutes, I had to stop entirely, leaning heavily on my trekking poles just to ensure I didn't completely pass out on the rocks. Four days of zero sleep, giving my sugar to Ben, zero food retention, water poisoning, and thirteen hours of continuous high altitude walking that day had finally got to me.
Ben walked directly behind me, quietly willing me onward, redirecting me if I swayed too far sideways, and forcing me to take brief breaks. Fred and Juma were looking on with genuine concern, actively asking Ben if they needed to call a stretcher to carry me down the final leg of the hike. Ben knew better than to let anyone carry me down.
"How are we not there yet?" I cried out after thinking we had nearly reached the Horombo huts. "We’ve been walking for hours!"
"I know, but we are so close, Em. It’s just over this last hill." Ben replied.
It was not over that hill. There were two more hidden hills behind it, and I swear to God I could have killed Ben right then and there as I looked for someone to blame for the mess I was in, when really I only had myself to blame for being in such a bad physical state.
Eventually, the final downward trail into the camp revealed itself. I tried to force my body to walk faster to reach a horizontal mattress, but there was absolutely nothing left in the tank so I trudged on painfully slowly.
We finally pulled into Horombo Huts. The camp was bustling with arriving hikers making their ascents, but I barely noticed them. I dropped to the dirt, sat flat on the floor, and waited to be told where to go for the night. Ben quietly stepped in, took my backpack, and led me to our cabin. Despite the crowded camp, Fred had pulled an absolute blinder and secured us yet another private hut.
The moment my boots cleared the hut door, I collapsed flat onto the mattress, pulled my sleeping bag over my head, and instantly lost consciousness without uttering a single word.
I awoke in a complete daze a few times over the evening, once when Martin brought hot tea and popcorn, once when Fred and Juma popped in for our final health checks and asked if I wanted dinner, and a few times when Ben asked me gentle questions that I simply lacked the physical energy to answer. I just drifted right back under after each brief glimpse into my surroundings through hazy eyes.
It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the deepest sleep I have ever had in my entire life.
Top Tips:
You need high-density, easily digestible sugar that won't instantly reject. If you are struggling with the camp foods make sure you had some snacks from home you can take up with you and for breakfast.
Keep an eye out for wildlife! Even in the pitch black lower scree slopes, you aren't entirely alone. Keep your headtorch moving, you might just spot the glowing yellow eyes of a jackal watching you.
Do not look up. If you lift your head to see where you are going, you will see an endless, near-vertical line of flickering headtorches stretching into the stars, looking impossibly distant. It might completely break your spirit. Keep your eyes locked firmly on the heels of the guide directly in front of you and focus on breathing and your walking rhythm.
The scree climb is a bit soul destroying. Turn your brain off and let the repetition take over. Breathe - step - Breath - step.
If the thin air starts making you sway, stumble, and wobble across the path, you are struggling. If the guides offer to carry your daypack, swallow your pride and let them take it. That is literally what they are there for. Saving your energy to reach the top is infinitely more important than your ego.
Near the top, the scree path vanishes and turns into a jumble of massive boulders. You will find yourself rock climbing by headtorch. Treat it like the glorious absurdity it is, if you can't find the humour in bouldering a volcano at 4:00 AM, you shouldn't be there.
The extreme cold will cause your headtorch battery to instantly drop from full to dead without warning, plunging you into pitch darkness mid scramble. Always keep a spare set of batteries or a backup torch in an easily accessible pocket close to your body heat.
Everyone tells you that you need to be at the Uhuru Peak sign for sunrise, but we found the narrow, snowy path of the crater rim while the sun breaks over the horizon spectacular. You felt like real explorers!
If you choose to tackle the mountain entirely raw without altitude sickness medication (like Diamox), be prepared for a battle. While everyone else is coasting along on chemical assistance, your body will be fighting for every single gasp of oxygen. It is brutal, but reaching the sign knowing you did it on hard mode is an unmatched feeling.
Do not expend 100% of your energy reaching the Uhuru Peak sign. The second the photos are taken, you face a brutal 4 to 5 hour descent back down the loose scree. Save some food for the return journey to Kibo.
Keep a vigilant eye on your partner or team. If they stop walking in a straight line, start veering sideways toward the sheer drop of the crater rim, or slur their words, force feed them sugar immediately. They are completely depleted of glycogen and operating on pure fumes. Also alert the guides if they have not noticed, though they should do given it is their job to ensure you are safe.
Do not fight the loose shale on the way down, that is how you destroy your knees. Lean forward slightly, trust your boot placement, and let yourself deliberately slide through the dirt like you are skiing. It’s an incredible quad workout, but it’s fast and strangely fun once you get the hang of it. Ask your guides to show you the technique if you have never done it before.
Just keep moving, no matter what you do, keep moving forward. You will get cold very quickly.
Do not forget to take it all in. It is easy to just get to the top and want to come down. Try and spend a few minutes admiring the view and appreciating what you have achieved.
Slow your breathing and your walking. You will be walking very slowly, try and match your breathing to this to get into a rhythm. Long, deep breathes in through your nose also help with not destroying the back of your throat.
Conquering high-altitude peaks and pushing through extreme physical barriers requires absolute grit, careful pacing, and resilient mental conditioning. If you want a coach who helps you build the exact physical endurance and mental fortitude needed for your biggest mountain goals, click here to learn more about my 1-on-1 Bespoke Endurance Coaching.
Comments