At 10:30 pm on the night of March 7th, I woke up, crawled out of my sleeping bag and, in the light of my headlamp, put on almost every piece of clothing I had packed. This was the night that I was going to walk from base camp to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I was leaving with the “early group” in solidarity with some of the slower hikers and as an attempt to embrace what was going to be an extremely long climb at any speed. The darkness was intimidating, and I took in what little light I could see as I waited for the others to get ready. Looking down at camp, I could see the soft glow of tents lit up like nightlights by the headlamps of other cold hikers within them. Basecamp spills out into a great valley that contains the city of Moshi over 12,000 feet of elevation and 4 climate zones away.
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