Northern and Southern Circuits

Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

William Mackesy’s account of this walk

Northern Circuit, March 2020, having climbed the Lemosho Route

Day 1: ShIra 2 camp to Moir Hut via Lava Tower

We're in a good routine now. Tea in our tents at 6.45, pack, the usual huge and bracing breakfast.

It is a beautiful morning, a clear sky allowing us to gaze across the plateau and the caldera rim to the grand silhouette of Meru in the distance.

We head straight back up the hill we climbed, past yesterday's vantage point, plodding on up into Alpine shrublands: lovely, vivid vegetation softening the harsh outcrops of old lava flows.

It is a long climb, but, given we are over 4,000m, it goes reasonable well.

At the junction where the Northern and Southern circuits meet, we turn east to make a gorgeous undulating traverse then a climb towards Lava Tower on the approach to the fearsome Western Breach. The altitude starts to tell, and I find the ups increasingly laborious.

 We are just on the vegetation line, alternating between small shrubs and bare Alpine desert. We head towards a long lava cliff, with the Lava Tower dominating the middle horizon.

Round above the cliff and down a short slope, a final exhausting climb gets me to the busy platform below the chunky but perhaps slightly disappointing tower, which, unusually, is less dramatic close up than I’d expected. The platform is covered with tents, a shock in this lonely landscape. 

Serena and Eugene are perched on boulders below the tower, but Bill doesn't like the look of the weak rock of the tower so he and I sit away, facing it, chewing our lunches and discussing our strange times.

The return to the junction is mainly downhill, so easier. We meet a very ill old man wobbling between two guides who hold a hand each. He is all pale khaki: his hat, his short, his trousers - and his face.  He is clearly suffering from severe altitude sickness and will die if not got down quickly. Charles remonstrates with the guides, even draws a line in the gravel which the man can't walk along. But he is clearly determined, and the guides overwhelmed. We head on. I still wonder about what happened to him, and feel guilty about not talking to his young companions, but altitude does funny things.

Back at the junction, we carry straight on, now on the Northern Circuit, along the contours, over vast lava slopes and between curious formations. 

After maybe 1.5 hours we reach the lip of our destination, a barren valley which is elegantly scooped and dead straight, clearly once a glacier. We soon see the Moir Hut campsite, a large gravelly flat by an infant stream with just two groups of tents: our lower-season good fortune. It is how I had hoped would be – well, perhaps I'd assumed something slightly more forgiving. 

A porter comes up to take a pack, a typically beyond-the-call gesture, if unnecessary. 

Down at the campsite, we enjoy the temporary pleasures of warm sun and no wind. I lie on my mattress with the tent door open, savouring the joys of not having to hurry into layered insulation. Then it is a wash and change, a quick kip, a sort-out.

We sit in the sun by the mess tent, enjoying the moment as we've been warned that this is a tougher world, and it will fall below zero as soon as the sun is down, with freezing air rolling  down from the glacier at the valley head. This is a very different-feeling place: with its gravelly bottom and scoured-smooth rock, it feels like a Utah canyon rather than a volcano.

Supper is at 6.15: peanut soup (our request after a success in Ethiopia), delicious and filling spaghetti Bolognese. 

We talk, I write, play backgammon facilitated by the patent Charlwood random number generator.

It is a cold night, but not that different from Shira 2 – but that may just be how it seems because I have more layers on.

Day 2: to Buffalo Camp via Lent Tower 

We are now well into our morning routine, dressing and clearing out or our tents before breakfast as usual. It is a beautiful clear, still morning, and warms up quickly when the sun hits the campsite.

I'm in the internet room when the team start singing. A prolonged time in tyhere means I miss the entire performance - but have a very harmonious session. Someone apparently suggested they gathered round the tent to serenade my exit. 

Serena and I have indented for personal oxygen for the summit: I've always regretted not having had the energy to enjoy the moment at the high pass on the sacred circuit round Mount Kailash in Tibet, and she has had similar experiences in Ladakh. We are to try it out now.  It seems easy, with a flexible plastic tube to my nose and hooked over my ears from a lightish cylinder on my back. It discharges a puff on each inhalation: result! 

We're off at 8.30, crossing the stream and clambering onto the local lava-flow, which has been smoothed by water or ice.

I roar up the steep hillside behind, towards the dramatic ridgetop tower that is our first target. The oxygen has kicked in. I know I'll make the top – and enjoy it! I get funny looks from the Germans who pass us as we drink our water on the col. Fine views back over our valley to the Shira Plateau.

We weave across rocky ground to the back of the first Lent Hill formation just above the col, then scramble to the top for thrilling views across the quiet plateau to Meru looming grandly in the distance.  Behind us, the ridge runs, in a series of further towers, until it merges with the rock and ice of the main Kibo mass. A really lusciously enjoyable few minutes. The platform is laden with stone assemblies, many ingenious, which add to the magic of the place.

The rest of the day is a long traverse round the north-western flank of that vast mass of rock and ice, Kibo, initially through harsh high Alpine desert behind the Lent ridge. The trail climbs steadily to a couple of ridges, all easy walking but for the altitude. 

We then drop to pretty Alpine moorland, some of my very favourite landscape, with a variety of gentle grey plants setting an undemonstratively delightful tone. Happy days. 

Bill and I loiter to take photos, and it is the last we see of Eugene and Serena. I suspect he tailors his pace to suit my plodding.

Kibo is wrapped in cloud, and Charles confirms what I suspect – it is snowing up high. Intimations of what may be coming our way cause a mild tightening of the intestines.

It becomes harder work: the path rougher, the valleys deeper, the climbs steeper, ending in a slog up to a long, sheer sill. We clamber up a break in the cliff: From the top, we can see our campsite, a bit over kilometre away, on a platform behind what looks like another sill. 

A final 20 minutes or so get us there. We soon tuck into a late lunch, with tent flaps open to enjoy the genuine warmth. A lovely moment, and a luxury to be here promptly and with no acclimatisation walk to come.

I retire to my tent, for what is meant to be a snooze but turns into deep sleep, and for quite a while. With poor nights and the altitude gnawing away, these walks are tiring even though they would be pretty straightforward in normal conditions . I wake dopey and disoriented.

We sit and talk lazily in much warmer air, despite our exposed position. Perched on the rocks just below the camp, we gaze on gorgeous, towering late afternoon storm clouds rumbling with thunder, which do their best to obscure the huge views towards the soda flats of Lake Natron. We witness prolonged lightning flickerings later on.

Supper is soup, beef Stroganoff, flambe pineapples - not bad for nearly 4,000 metres! I fall asleep as Charles gives our next-day briefing. 

Some relaxed chat, then Bill and Eugene peel off: I teach Serena German Whist.

To my sack and read Sebastian Faulks' Engleby. Not impressed. Very near quitting. 

Day 3: to Third Cave

Kili is not quite on an east-west axis, so our north-slopes platform gets early sun, and today we are greeted by clear skies with Kili gleaming above us and huge views out over the sleeping plains under their ragged covering of clouds.

We take breakfast with the mess tent fully open to the warm sunshine at 7.30: we revel in a interlude of ease on our demanding journey: a few minutes lounging in the sun while camp is struck feel like luxury.

We're off promptly for a short morning which turns out to be the easiest walking of the entire journey, a beautiful meander through highland scrub, in steady sun with views of Kibo to our right and the clouds and plains below us to our left. There is some up and down, and the ups very quickly have me plodding and panting, but Bill and Eugene and I reach the Third Cave camp at 11.45, having talked all the way about Hong Kong, Brexit, Labour's recent history. (Amazing, in hindsight, how little we touch on the virus in all our 9 days, other than brief consternation following the occasional brief flicker of communications, emerging to find a changed world which I for one take a few days to get properly to grips with.)

The camp is on a long gravel slope by a wide dry river bed, smooth enough for an orderly set-up but a desolate spot as soon as the sun goes in.

Serena has been here for ages (we didn't even see her dust) and I tell her I definitely want her on the Canada exploration I’m planning, to be the one out front to disturb the bears for us.

A delicious pre-prandial kip, then a filling prand, then write this account and start an article categorizing artists by whether their sensibilities are renaissance or baroque (bit woozy with the altitude, I suspect).

We're off at 2.30 for an acclimatisation climb up tomorrow's trail. The clouds come down as we leave, gusts swirling around us to turn a bleak landscape into a miserable one.  An hour's steady trudge up a steepish gravel slope and then a final really steep section sees us 325m higher at above the 4,000m mark, tedious and (for me, anyway) the final slope exhausting, but an encouraging performance for the coming challenge.

 We're back down in 40 minutes. It starts to rain half way down, which would normally depress, but we've banked 6 good days despite an appalling forecast, so can only be philosophical. Fingers crossed for the summit!

Change for the night, supper and chat in the tent. I don't now remember much, but I think we retired to tents and I wrestled onward with Engleby, gripped despite not liking it: but there is a surly suspense about it.

Day 4: to Outward Bound Hut

Another efficient start: up, packed and breakfasted and off at soon after 8am.

It is a heavy, lowering day, the cloud close above us. We have a 4 hour flog some 800m up to the Outward Bound Hut comp at 4,700m (15,500-ish ft). 

We take it very slowly, plodding up the path we took yesterday. A bit of a boring slog is relieved by some wonderful views of Mawenzi, Kili’s soaring, gracefully castellated second peak, more like Mount Kenya than Mount Kenya itself, which appears over the ridge to our east, lent mystery by evanescent shreds of rising cloud, quite soon after we leave camp. Then we settle down to the rhythm. We reach yesterday's terminus in 20 minutes longer than yesterday, but I feel a lot better. Acclimatization or slow pace? I don't care....