Day 7 - Crater to Summit to Mweka camp

Hey,

So picking up where I left off... It was *COLD* before sun-up. So cold, in fact, that I decided lots of hot tea was more important than catching the sunrise esp since my camera does nothing well but document stuff (its a full moon, the most picturesque time of every day is night when the clouds clear and there's a perfect view of Kili and her glaciers lit up by the moon, stars in the background inches off the sides of the mountain, or all the towns slightly lit by 3rd World low level lighting. All that stuff comes out as pure black with the Oly Stylus 1050.).
We drink up tea and head out. Knowing that we have some rocks to negotiate, I don the trusty 5.10s. BIG MISTAKE. I take 10 steps on the permafrost and my toes start to freeze. I assume they'll recover as the blood starts flowing (that's how its been for the last couple days). Nope. As we climb, I feel stronger and stronger. 1000 ft above the crater floor, I'm back to being ready to run a marathon. Damn, it must really have been sulfer or something because 1000 ft up should have thinned the air, not made me feel strong.

Strong as I feel, I'm starting to panic. I've lost al sensation in the left thumb toe, and the next two are feeling frozen. Also, the pad of my foot is starting to freeze. On the right foot, its my pinky toe that goes first, then the 4th and then the 3rd that start to freeze. It dawns on me that the problem isn't the fact that its hell-frozen-over cold, it's the damn tunda we're walking on. In that case, the thicker running shoes will help even though they flow air like there's no tomorrow. I also have one of those heat pads (air activated) for emergencies. I sit on a frozen rock, pull off a shoe and the outside socks down to the skin-layer sock, and stick the heat pad on the sock under my pad. The nice freezing wind isn't helping, but I have 0% sensation in my thumb toe. The rest, on both feet, hurt. Pain is good, no feeling at all is frozen. I smack the feet to get circulation and don the runners. We pass the summit sign, take a couple pics, and start running. I tell James we have to book to (1) get blood flowing in my toe or (2) find someone with hot water in which case, I can do an assessment of my toe and if its not actually frozen tissue (it wasn't hard as a rock, just zero sensation) then I can warm it with 100 deg F water. We take off down the mountain and get to the first camp in 90 minutes. OH, I forgot to mention, my crew aside from my guide skipped the summit, hitting Gilman Point without going over the top. We caught them as we entered Barafu camp. My feet were no longer cold. At all. I was drenched with sweat.

We moved to a good spot and I saw a group of whitey, so I dropped pack where my guys were going to make breakfast, and jumped down the rocks to say hello. Chatted fo a couple minutes and wished them luck and then ran up to the rocks and jumped up them back to my guys. I overheard 'how could he go up the rocks as fast as he went down them?' A few minutes later, they passed by with the typical (infuriatingly slow) polepole walk (if I had to guess, it's under 1mph on flat, smooth trail).

We headed down some more and I took pics of how terrible the trail was - will post later. What a long day - we climbed over 1000 ft and then decended over 9000 ft. I think that's like coming down from the summit of Whitney and continuing to Lone Pine, except 5000 ft higher. Yes, my knees are destroyed and my quads aren't talking to me. Or rather, they're screaming at me.

Ok, time to find signal. Once again, all the vodacom folks have perfect signal.

Joel