A Petroleum Engineer on Kilimanjaro

A Petroleum Engineer On Kilimanjaro

By Mick Harrison ? 2019

Hi, my name is Mick Harrison.  They say life is full of challenges. I agree. In 2014 who would have thought that I would be living in Egypt, working as a senior petroleum engineer for one of the finest oil and gas companies in the world. That alone presented its own set of challenges; however, I want to tell you about another personal challenge, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa.

I had come to Tanzania with my two best friends from Cairo, Rick, a hotel manager, and Mark, a diplomat. We climbed from January 26 to February 5, 2014. The three of us had trained in a place called Wadi Degla, a dry riverbed in the desert near Cairo where people go to run, hike and ride mountain bikes. For the last five months we walked 10-12 miles in the Wadi on Saturdays and then jogged for 2-3 miles twice per week to get ourselves into condition. There were a total of 12 people on our climb which included an airline pilot, a dentist, two advertising executives, a music teacher, a financial consultant, and a mortgage broker with his two awesome sons – man, how those young men could climb. Six of us were over 50 years old, three in their 30s, one 40s, one 20s and one 16-year-old. 

This was the most difficult thing I have ever done. I thought the first 7 days of the ascent would be easy, but not so. It was 7 days of rigorous climbing up and down the mountains to get us into shape and acclimated to the altitude. Even the second day 6 ? hour scramble up many long 60 degree inclines was physically harder than anything I had ever done before. By the end of the second day, my mind wanted to stay, but my legs were screaming to go home. There was never a day off. I rarely work out for 6-7 hours a day, and if I ever do wear myself out, I take a few days off to recuperate. Not so on this trek. You had to put on your boots and hit the trail daily. The climb got increasingly harder as we progressed up the mountain. Sometimes I thought my thighs would fall off the bone by the time evening rolled around. There were many times that I thought I was too worn out to go on, but I kept trying.  At the higher altitudes I slept for only 2- 4 hours a night. The food wasn’t that tasty, but I found myself eating whatever was put in front of me. No shower for 8 days. My fingernails were so dirty that I could hardly stand to look at them, but that’s just the way it was.

One of the great rewards of the trip was the scenery. I took about 500 pictures. During most of the climb we were above the clouds. It was like I was hiking in a dream as it often appeared that I could jump off the mountain into a million puffy cotton balls. The sunsets were more beautiful than any I have seen before. Layers of intense red and yellow would gradually appear with the rest of the spectrum eventually revealing itself as the sun sank into an ocean of meringue on top of one of the world’s tallest frozen desserts. I saw plants and trees that grow only on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Some of them looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, almost like tall animals with fat bellies and large green leaves for hair.  It was a breath-taking journey – figuratively and literally!  

Every night I would have to leave my tent at least once to perform a necessary biological function. On a few occasions I became claustrophobic after being inside the tent for 6-8 hours, and I just had to get outside to clear my mind. I couldn’t breathe quite as well at 12,000 to 15,000 feet, and I often laid there most of the night thinking about what could have possessed me to undertake such a crazy mission to climb the tallest mountain on the continent. By the time I put my on boots and jacket, I would be breathing hard simply trying to unzip my tent. It was an additional shock to my system when I emerged into the abrupt night air. When I got outside, I was greeted by millions of stars that were punching holes in the sky. Sometimes I would stay outside my tent so long while observing the heavens that I would be shivering by the time I decided to go back inside. One night I stayed out long enough to see two shooting stars. It was as if I was the only one on the mountain, and God was rewarding me for my pain and suffering with my own personal light show.

On the evening of the 6th day, we arrived at the 15,000’ base camp. All of us were exhausted.  We ate supper, and I decided to give us a little pep talk because I was the senior member of the group at 59 years old. Here is my speech as much as I can recall, “Being the senior member of our group, I thought it fitting that I give a little speech about what we are about to do tonight. I think this is the perfect time to recite a poem from the beginning of one of my favorite books, “Now take my hand and hold it tight, I will not fail you here tonight. For failing you I fail myself and place my soul upon a shelf. In hell’s library without a light, I will not fail you here tonight.” - Dean Koontz, The Book of Counted Sorrows. It’s going to be dark out there, it’s going to be cold, and it’s going to be hard. It’s already been five times as hard as I thought it would be, but I have kept on trekking, and so have all of you. We are all here for individual reasons. I’m here to prove to myself that I’m not too old to accomplish such a feat, and I’m also here to show my children that they can do anything if they try hard enough to reach their goals. I’m certain that all of you have your own individual reasons for climbing this mountain, as some of you have already shared with me. I think all of us have also noticed there is something else at work here too. We have become a team as we have climbed thus far to 15,000’. Together we can often accomplish more than the individual. If you fall down, I’m going to do my best to pick you up. I know that Rick and Mark would do the same for me, and by now I think I know the rest of you well enough to believe that a helping hand or word of encouragement will be given where needed.” I then told individual members of the team how much I valued their contribution to help other members get this far. We all certainly had our moments when we thought we might not make it, but there we were ready to climb the last 4,431’ with less oxygen than any of us had ever experienced. I ended my oration by saying, “I love all of you guys. Let’s do this as one team and go climb this damn mountain together! Nothing less than the 12 of us at the summit will do.”

Later our chief guide, Theo, talked with us about the perils of the final ascent which included hypothermia, frostbite, possible heart attack, brain hemorage, fatal blood clot in the lungs, not being able to get enough oxygen and dying of asphyxiation and, of course, falling off the mountain because it was going to be very dark as we were beginning our final climb at midnight. All of us listened intently to him because this was his 175th time to climb this great mountain. It was all very uncomfortable to say the least, but there was some slight reassurance that our lives were in the hands of this very experienced guide.

Spirits weren’t all that high at midnight as 11 climbers and 6 guides started our climb toward the summit of 19,341’.  They had sent the financial consultant on ahead of us by himself with a guide at 11 pm because his physical conditioning was slightly worse than the rest of us and our chief guide thought he needed additional time. I didn’t envy him having to make the final ascent by himself – much better to do it as a team. It was pitch black as we started up the mountain. We all had headlamps, and you could only see the back of the legs and feet of the climber in front of you.  The only thing you could do was trudge on and hope that time would pass quickly. After the first hour climb up a 45-degree, 200,000-year-old lava flow, I was exhausted. Another hour went by, and I was leaning on my trekking poles trying to stand up straight. It was difficult because I was cold and couldn’t get enough oxygen. Once in a while I would look way up the mountain to see a few headlamps far up ahead of us, and once in while I would look behind me to see the lights of several other teams snaking up the trail. Every time I looked up or down, I would get a little dizzy, so I just focused on the climber’s feet in front of me. 

Then almost simultaneously three of the other climbers were in distress, so we took a break. One was the airline pilot. He was the worst and barely standing. He mentioned that he had a slight case of asthma that was giving him problems. The other two were younger guys with bad headaches, one of the indicators of high-altitude sickness and a reason you might not make it to the top. They put the airline pilot right in front of me, and he was barely able to stand up. After each step he would hang on his poles and then trudge on following in the footsteps of the guide in front of him. I figured as long as Mike, my new friend the airline pilot was going forward that I would just follow him. He was my inspiration. How could I quit when he was clearly moving forward on sheer will and determination. “Keep it up Mike, together we can lead this team to the top,” I put forth in as loud a voice as possible.” I reached down inside of myself and found my own boundless determination. And that’s how it went. I remembered something that the airline pilot had told me a few days earlier when we had first hiked to 14,000 feet. He had told me if the cabin pressure in an airliner gets to an equivalent of 14,000 feet, that’s when the oxygen masks drop from the ceiling. Here we were at almost 17,000 feet, and guess what, there were no oxygen masks that would magically fall out of the sky for our assistance. It was our lungs against the air on the mountain, and no one on the team knew for sure if he was going to make it to the top. I’m fairly certain if one of us had called it quits at that point, others would have followed.

We held on and made it to the 6th hour when the head guide said we were at the point of no return. I reveled in that. No way to go back, only forward. We were all totally and utterly exhausted, but not defeated. “Come on team we can do this,” someone wheezed. I don’t know how we kept going. We just kept putting one foot in front of the other with no way to go, but up. We trekked on and met the financial consultant coming back down because he had already made it to the summit. He had been the last one to camp the first three days of the climb. Many of us had given him words of encouragement. The last three days he was right there at the front of the pack and now had beaten all of us to the top of the mountain. What a determined man. Most of us let out faint cheers to his success as it was difficult to do anything, but continue climbing. It was a psychological boost knowing that he had made it to the top and that we could probably get there too. I was very proud of him.

We made it to Stella Point at about the 7-hour mark and then on another 40 minutes to the tallest point, Uhuru Peak, 19,341’ (5,895 meters), which took a total of 7 hours, 40 minutes. That last 40 minutes was so difficult. I knew I could do it, but could barely breathe. My heart was pounding so hard that I thought I might burst an aorta, but I survived as did the others. The airline pilot was looking much better. I was so impressed with him. He had just climbed the last 6 hours on pure willpower and true grit. What a feat! He didn’t want to be the only one on the team who didn’t make it. I’m sure the financial consultant felt the same way, as did I. Later on other team members expressed similar feelings. None of us wanted to fail ourselves or the team. 

Once at the top I felt euphoric. There were partially melted glaciers everywhere I looked. We took a few pictures at the summit and were then ushered down by our guides. The oxygen was just too thin to stay up there very long. It was a clear day, and the last photo I took from the roof of Africa was of the towns and checker-boarded plots of land in the valley below. The photo was like one you would take out of the window of an airplane. Everything was a long way down. 

We then had to climb down. I had heard about skiing the skree. Skree are the loose sand and volcanic pebbles in long runs down the mountain. I used my boots like skis and used my trekking poles like ski poles. Pretty soon I was flying down the mountain like Jean-Claude Killy in the 1968 Winter Olympics. It was fun for the first hour and a half then my knees got really tired. Reflecting back, I’m certain in my hypoxic state that it was more dangerous to ski the skree than I perceived, but I didn’t fall down, and it was quite fun. I then hiked down the remaining 2 hours back to the base camp. Total time from the summit back to base camp took 3 ? hours. We rested for a couple of hours, had some lunch, and then climbed down from 15,000’ to 10,000’. It was thundering while sleeting and snowing. I think Kili was sorry to see us go, but I like Killy had extracted my own gold medal in determination from the mountain. The conditions became very slippery as we climbed down a not so dry creek bed filled with large, mud laden rocks. It took us another 5 hours to reach the 10,000’ camp.  It was 6 o’clock in the evening by then, and I was beyond exhausted, but happy I had kept climbing to achieve my objective of setting foot on the highest point in Africa.  We ate supper and retired to our tents where I slept for a solid 8 hours for the first time in 7 days. We got up early the next morning to climb down another 5,000’, which took only 4 hours. The last 2 hours were sheer torture on my knees, and I found myself side stepping down steep rocks and logs to avoid any unnecessary impact on my joints. I was elated to reach our final destination at the base of the mountain where our bus awaited. Everyone had a Kilimanjaro beer, and there was much rejoicing. As soon as we got to our hotel near the town of Moshi, I showered, and then took the shuttle into town where I purchased 18 bottles of good South African Pinotage wine. We celebrated the rest of the day and night.

Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro was the hardest physical and mental challenge of my life. It was painful. There was a measure of self-abuse that just had to be endured. It’s amazing how much your body can take. Being tortured daily could not have felt much different. In the end I believe the mental aspect was the hardest part. You just had to knuckle down and do it and let nothing deter you from your goal. Every word of encouragement from another team member was like additional oxygen. It was us against the mountain. We did it together and became an indomitable troop in the process. I think all of us had something to learn on our trek, and Kilimanjaro was a formidable teacher. Those lessons in determination will be forever etched in our hearts, lungs, soles of our feet, and our collective memory of success.

I want to share one more quote before I leave you. “You don’t have to be a hero to accomplish great things – to compete. You can just be an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.”  Sir Edmund Hillary. My fellow climbers and I are just ordinary people, but together as one cohesive team we accomplished an extraordinary feat. We climbed the highest mountain in Africa and learned the team is just as important as the individual.