Mount Meru

Our 4-day trek up and down Mt. Meru was epic. We started out Friday morning – cool and overcast – down in Arusha National Park which is lush and green. We traveled with a guide named Paul and a cook named Freddy. At the base of the hike, the park assigned us to go with another group and we got a ranger named Harry who carried a rifle (but he never had to use it). The other group was 9 Brits, mostly high school students from Yorkshire, and their guide nicknamed “Whitey,” who was very cheerful and a good singer who kept us all entertained.

The day one hike, from gate (1500m elevation = 4921 feet) to the Meriakamba Huts, which were in the cloud layer at 2500m (8202 feet). During our hike we saw giraffe grazing the trees, colobus monkeys, and lots of evidence on the trail that there were water buffalo around. We carried daypacks with our extra layers and our personal items, and a group of 6 porters went at their own pace (faster, usually) to carry our sleeping bags, food and water and cooking gear. Here is Harry explaining the lay of the land to Tona.



“Huts” sounds primitive but turned out to be very comfortable timber hostels. Our cook put out bowls of warm water for us to wash in.



Think Northern Maine, that’s what the climate felt like there – damp and cold. After dinner the clouds cleared a little and we could see farther up the mountain towards the summit (photo taken with long exposure).



They woke us in the morning with thermoses of brewed ginger and then breakfast. The second day’s hike was a similar climb in elevation, another 1000 km, but a very different terrain. It started out in misty forest with gigantic ancient twisted trees hung with Spanish moss, and muddy slogging on the trail.



Above the cloud layer, though, the trail turned dusty and the trees turned into 6-ft high heathers and small-needle piney herbs and bushes.



We reached Saddle Hut (3500m = 11,482 feet), which was sunny and cold, in the early afternoon and lunched there and rested. The air was noticeably thinner, and just beyond the edge of the cliff was a sea of clouds that stretched all the way to Kilimanjaro to the east. That afternoon we hiked “Little Meru,” which takes about an hour from Saddle Hut and is 3801m high (12,470 feet).



Behind us is the summit of “Big Meru,” a 7-hour hike away. Climbing Little Meru was a way to acclimatize (although in Tona’s case, it brought on vomiting). That night, we ate an early dinner (soup, carrot pancakes, pasta with vegetable sauce, plate of fruit--or in Tona's case, nothing) and went to bed.



Big Meru is an ancient volcano crater with an interior ash cone. The hike takes you around the rim of the crater to its highest point. It’s a serious high-altitude climb and few children attempt it. The official rules are that children under 10 should not go above Meriakamba and children under 16 should not go above Saddle, so we had to sign a waiver for Halle and Jacob in the Saddle Hut logbook. It was a remarkable thing for someone their age to attempt this climb.



Summit Day: wake at 1 am. Dress warmly, in lots of layers, with winter jackets and headlamps. Stars: very bright, with a bright moon. Set off at 1:30 am headed up, with our guide, a ranger, and several porters brought along specially for “dada and kaka ndogo” (the Swahili words for little sister and brother); first through a dusty tree landscape, and then on bare boulders, up to Rhino Point, which is about the same height as Little Meru. Beyond Rhino Point, the going got very rough indeed – a slippery volcanic-gravel steep path between the crater on one side and the slope down on the other, and then bouldering across a bare rock face at a steeper than 45-degree angle in the pitch dark, working our way around the crater at more than 14,500 feet high. At that point Tona (who wasn’t keeping much down) decided to call it quits, and Harry gently guided her back down, which took from 4:30 am until sunrise at 6:30. She was on Rhino Point about that time and could see the sun coming up behind Kilimanjaro and lighting up the sea of clouds.

Everyone else kept going, another 2.5 hours to the summit. It was a hard push, much of the time without a trail, climbing with all fours on bare rock. There are 4 separate peaks on the way to the highest summit (14,900 feet), each one harder and higher than the next. This is the view backward towards Kili a short time after sunrise.



By the time they got to the top, everyone’s pulse was going like a hummingbird and lips were turning blue. Some of our group vomited, and everyone was struggling in the altitude and exertion. But we made it!




Coming down took them until almost 10 am, back to Saddle Hut, where Tona had been trying to warm up in the sleeping bag. Here’s a view from between the summit and Rhino Point, showing the ash cone inside the crater, and the sea of clouds.



The late morning and early afternoon of Summit Day, everyone rested and slept and had some lunch (for those that were feeling like eating). Then we gathered our gear and hiked back down to Meriakamba to eat and sleep. Everyone was incredibly sore and tired. We slept like volcanic rocks that night.

Day 4: this morning, we woke up at 6:30, breakfasted at 7, gathered gear and headed down the same hike as we had done on Day 1. We were feeling much better being another 2000 meters down, and finding that we had all sunburned the day before, and were really looking forward to hot showers and clean clothes. A Safari vehicle picked us up and we had a short game drive through Arusha National Park, where we saw one of the Momela Lakes covered in pink flamingoes.



Now, back at KCMC for one night, we are packing and organizing things for the next leg of our trip. We’re sore in muscle and sunburned, but we are clean and safe and proud of our achievement!