Band of Brothers: Trek up Mt. Kilimanjaro Unites Father and Sons

June 16, 2004

How should a father and his sons celebrate their sense of family on Fathers Day? You might take a tip from Bill Howard, who accompanied his brother Dave and two sons, Scott and Craig, up Mount Kilimanjaro last fall, summiting Africa’s highest mountain for the literal high point of a lifetime.
“My uncle and dad made a list of the things they’d like to do most in life and decided it would be a neat thing to climb Kilimanjaro,” says Scott Howard, an environmental attorney from Traverse City. “As Boy Scouts, we climbed the Tooth of Time peak at Philmont Ranch in New Mexico and we have a picture of the three of us on the summit. He thought, wouldn’t it be neat to have a picture of us on top of Kilimanjaro. They’d been kicking the idea around for a couple of years and got serious about it a year before we left.”

GOING UP
Brothers Bill, 61, and Dave, 56, joined brothers Scott, 34, and Craig, 29, on a grueling six-day hike up and down the 19,347-foot extinct volcano, leaving the U.S. on Sept. 28 and returning Oct. 13. Their trip included a warm-up climb on Mt. Meru in Tanzania, which is just short of 15,000 feet.
Hiking in Africa is an expedition-level experience. The Howards arranged their trip through the Jagged Globe Co., a British mountaineering firm. Just getting to Africa required two days of travel by way of London, Amsterdam and Dar Es Salaam. The foursome landed at Kilimanjaro International Airport in Tanzania, which is a popular trek jump-off point.
“We stayed in the town of Moshe,
which has a phenomenally different culture,” Howard says. “It’s a third-world country, so it really gives you a different perspective on your own life and what we really need. There were people living in places there that we’d think were abominable -- they had barely a roof over their heads, with running water being nonexistent.”
Similarly, the Howards felt pangs of first-world guilt about handing their gear off to some 25 porters who had the literally back-breaking job of trudging up the mountainside with loads balanced on their heads for $5 a day, plus tips -- considered good money in Tanzania.
“The porters were amazing,” he recalls. “They carried between 40 and 60 pounds on their heads and backs and they’d still go speeding up the trail past us. It made me feel guilty, but these jobs are really important to the local economy which depends on agri-culture and tourism. Without the porter jobs, a lot of the people we met wouldn’t have anything.”

FEELING THE STRAIN
All four in the Howard’s party prepared themselves with some combination of running, walking and strength training before they left on what was an exhausting hike at times.
“We started out with a hike up Mount Meru to help in the acclimatization process,” Howard notes. “It also served to help our guides figure out everyone’s level of fitness and how they’d react to the altitude.”
Climbing at 15,000 feet and beyond can be a literal one-way deathtrip due to altitude sickness. “You run the risk of pulmonary or cerebral edema happening -- we heard that two or three people died on Kilimanjaro while we were up there.
“The higher you get the more it affects you,” he adds. “I had some pretty solid headaches and felt pretty nauseous at the top of Kilimanjaro. You certainly lose your sense of balance; your speech pattern slows and you have trouble breathing.”
He says the hike up Mt. Meru was more interesting than Kilimanjaro in some respects. “We saw a lot of wildlife on Meru, including zebra, giraffe, warthogs, buffalo, dik-diks, monkeys and baboons. The hike up Meru included a long trek through tropical rainforest, which was a nice contrast to Kilimanjaro’s bleak, volcanic slope.

KILIMANJARO CLIMB
Kilimanjaro, the mountain romanticized by Ernest Hemingway and explorers such as Sir Richard Burton, Stanley & Livingston, exists in the minds of would-be adventurers and mountaineers as a must-do, despite its rather drab ascent through volcanic ash.
“There are some very well established routes and camps on the mountain,” Howards says. “We spent four-and-a-half days going up and one-and-a-half coming down. At the base camp, we spent two nights just getting acclimated to the altitude -- the guides are very sensitive about the altitude and losing people. The biggest problem they have is with people who are bound and determined to get to the top despite the warning signs of altitude sickness.”
The Howard party reached Arrow camp at 3 p.m. the day before their summit and tried to go to sleep by 7.
“At that altitude you don’t sleep very well. You can listen to your heart pounding in your chest. We were on the trail by 12:30 that night and summited at about 9 in the morning. You try to get up early because the weather is clearest then and also to make sure there’s plenty of time for the people struggling up the mountain. We didn’t arrive back in camp until 3 in the afternoon, so it was an all night and day climb -- a very grueling day.”

REFLECTIONS
“In some ways it was more subdued than I thought it would be,” Scott says of his view from Africa’s highest mountain. “Kilimanjaro is an enormous volcano, so it’s not as dramatic a peak as Mt. Meru. You can look across the crater and see the glaciers that cover the mountain.”
He adds that future climbers may not see the glaciers much longer. “There are enormous glaciers up there, but because of global warming, they’re receding at an alarming rate. The whole mountain used to be covered, but over the last 20 years the glaciers have retreated by half. Within the next 20 years they’ll be gone.
“It hammers home some of the legal work we’ve done here (in Northern Michigan) on water rights and environmental issues because once the glaciers are gone from the world, there’s going to be a huge water crisis. There are some very interesting and depressing issues there.”
For Scott and his brother Craig, climbing Kilimanjaro with their dad and uncle was “kind of like regressing back to when we all lived back home and the trips we took back then. It was great to enjoy the time with my dad, my brother and uncle -- those types of memories are so valuable, and you keep them forever.”