Rollin' Down the Hill

TOP: Looking up at Gillman's Point (edge of crater)

2nd: Volcanic-dust skiing down the crater

3rd: Patrice with what's left of Gary ~ 18.5K (Note the awesome hairstyle!)

4th: Gary explaining to Bob what a heck of a martini this glacier would make

The summit was almost anticlimactic (OK, NOT!) after the work effort to get there. You get in your 15 minutes of fame (Read: Gasping for oxygen, water, and sleep), then start the downstroke. The sun is finally up, so the air is warming up quickly, that's a huge relief. I was chilled to the bone, and this from a guy who grew up in Rochester NY. About as cold as I've ever been.

Patrice, Bob, and I start hiking down, but we're both quite beat up (well, in reality patrice is skipping and singing swahili love songs). After an hour or so we make Gillman's Point again (the crater edge), and start heading down the volcanic ash cinder-dome. Peter joins us at Gillman's, and teaches us how to "ash-ski" down the dome. It is VERY cool, and we recover something like 2K in elevation in a bit more than an hour. You just have to be careful when you hit an ash-hole, so you don't fall.

Unfortunately, nobody mentioned to us about the lung effect of the volcanic dust. By the time we hit the bottom of the cindercone, we were both coughing like black lung patients in a coal mine. Probably took 10 years off of our lives with all the dust we ingested. (ED NOTE: We would all be brutally sick for ~ 1 week following...I had people get off busses that I was on in Amsterdam and NOBODY was happy being our seatmates on the flights home).

We arrived at Kibo hut (15K) in a few hours, then continued on to 12K, arriving just before nightfall. A light rainfall for the last couple of hours was pleasant, even at that elevation. After being up for basically 36 hours straight, climbing up 4K and down 7K, dehydrated, and depleted, we were very happy to collapse into our 5' bunk beds. Even the hole-in-the-ground toilets looked good to me!

We awoke the next morning, had yet another great breakfast, and trudged the miles down the hill back to the exit at 6K. In a personal tribute to one of the guides, I asked Moses to carry my pack the last 100 meters...the porters considered it an honor to be able to help, and a sign of machismo to offload the anglos. He was deserving.

One last hike post next time to wrap things up.

Lumpy Out