So...Summit Day

​​It goes like this. On the 27th we quit early and to bed (if possible) late afternoon.  At midnight on July 28, assuming heart rate and O2 levels acceptable, we leave camp with headlamps.  For the next seven hours we ascend 3000 feet to Uhuru Point. Its a conga line of a hundred various souls from various troops making only five steps a minute. Pole. Pole.(slowly slowly)   Switchbacks carved in the old volcano take time to navigate.  There’s no passing lane.  And not a reasonable way to bail out.  So really pole pole.  Just a day after the full moon, it should still be light. But the trail above and below are a string of lights moving slowly upward conveyor like. Except the conveyance are legs and lungs soon to be spent. Pole pole.  Then the top.  Dawn.  A very quick picture.  A gaze around.  The headache from brain swelling is kept reasonable by the Advil, and the lungs open from another drug but even so, it’s minutes and then down.  Spikes are on the feet and poles this time real poles keep the body from careening down the path. And in two more hours at a safer lower level 15500 feet we rest one hour to breathe and the four more hours down to really comfortable camp and sleep.    

Why? That’s a very theological question.  I’ll see if an answer comes when I get back.  30000 a year do it. It’s pretty weird. Why?   
For a friend,  I guess. Just to see if I can? Probably less so.  Cause it’s there? No. Plenty of other there there’s to visit long before here.   So why? Turn it around.  Why are you here at all?  Why do you do what you do?  Cause it pays the bills? Cause everyone else does it?  Why are you? Let’s have that conversation.