Major scale
On the way up Mount Kilimanjaro, Brenda Smith, a Post Falls police officer, received a warning. “Pole, pole,” the African porters said. That’s Swahili for “slowly, slowly.” Smith’s 17-member climbing expedition heeded the advice and everyone made it to the summit after a six-day trek.
Smith spent nine months preparing for the challenge while strategizing to reach financial goals. With the help of more than 200 private donors and local businesses, she was able to donate nearly $10,000 for breast cancer research to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. She came within a few hundred dollars of her target before leaving for her trip in August. The cancer center receives 86 percent of the funds raised as part of the Climb to Fight Breast Cancer, which has climbers conquering mountain peaks such as Mount Hood, Mount Baker and Mount Rainier. Smith, 31, chose the largest mountain with the greatest financial requirement.
On day one of the climb, Smith learns that Q’emiln Park rock climbing is no match for Kilimanjaro. Half of the climbers in her group are part of the fund-raiser and the rest are private adventurers. They start out excited and anxious. They take off like rockets and are immediately told, “Pole, pole!”
“The first day was the steepest,” Smith said. “It goes straight up. An hour into it I realized that it was more strenuous than I expected. If you don’t go slow, it drains you immediately.”
The 70 porters accompanying her group make the trek at least three times per month. They carry about 100 pounds of gear on their heads, including a dining table and chair for each member of the expedition. They laugh as if it were nothing, while Smith feels guilty that they labor for her luxury.
On day three Smith learns of a climber from another group who was carried down. The information is kept hush, hush, but they hear later that he was killed after a loose rock struck him, causing internal injuries.
Her group climbs more cautiously and she thinks of the mountain as a huge mirage.
“You keep looking up and you think you’re seeing the top, but it’s not,” she said.
Everyone in the group is affected differently by the altitude. Most have headaches. Many have stomach problems. Smith dodges those, but suffers with insomnia, as do most of the campers. Despite nightly exhaustion, the sound of voices chattering in the tents carries on through the night.
The other two females in the climbing group share cancer stories. An emergency room nurse lost her mother to breast cancer. Another woman’s mother died of lung cancer. Smith had a biopsy on two benign lumps at age 26, which prompted her involvement in this trek. Cancer has claimed or altered the lives of several women in her family.
On Aug. 14, it is freezing at midnight when the guides ready the group for the summit climb. They are fed a meal heavy in carbohydrates but Smith is too nervous to eat. They strap on headlamps and begin climbing under moonlight. Sandy rock makes for a shuffling gait and Smith glances back at the bundled-up travelers with their headlights. They look like a pack of aliens. Her hands and feet feel frozen and she sinks about four inches with every step into the powdery earth.
The altitude starts to get to her. She feels disoriented and off kilter. She watches the blurry steps of the person in front of her. Although most hiking days there is friendly chatter, the summit day is quiet. Everyone is concentrating on steps and breath. Halfway up, the water bottles have frozen. At one point Smith feels herself leaning far to the right and the hiker behind her straightens her with a tug.
She has to stop and take her boot off. A toenail has cut into her toe and blood squishes about. She removes her boot to bandage it and feels like she plunged her foot into an icy stream.
At 5:45 a.m., the group reaches the summit, Uhuru Peak, the highest point in Africa at 19,340 feet. Fifteen minutes later the sun rises. Stars are still out and thermoses appear as a gift from the porters. They are filled with hot tea. Smith can see spectacular glaciers in all directions and feels grateful that she has a chance to see them before global warming shrinks them into oblivion.
After the summit, it is 10,000 feet down a slope of loose shale rock. The hikers use their boots for skis and dust is their snow. They stop at a camp where Kilimanjaro beer is sold. It goes straight to one’s head. They are serenaded in Swahili by the porters and told they were the fastest group ever to summit together. No more “pole, pole.”
After the climb, Smith tours Serengeti plains. She watches a lioness devour a grouselike bird. She watches as a cheetah mothers her cubs. Elephants, zebras and giraffes come out for a hello. She spends a few days trying to unwind on Zanzibar Island, but is looking forward to mom and home.
More than $1 million has been raised for cancer research through the Climb to Fight Breast Cancer. One of the things Smith likes about the Fred Hutchinson center’s work is that they focus on early detection, not just cancer’s cure. If found soon enough most cancers will be curable, she believes.
Her future goals sound grounded and practical. She returns to work on the police force and thinks about taking Swahili lessons. She found the language easy and once she showed an interest, the porters tried to teach her a new word every day. She denies plans to climb mountains any time soon.
“The summit day will probably be the most amazing day of my life forever, unless I do something bigger,” she said. “It’s a huge sense of accomplishment and I feel very fortunate that I had the opportunity to do it. I have a lot of thank-you cards to write.”