A Family Climb of Kilimanjaro
Julie Smith, November 4, 2026
This is a summary of my account of our climb of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. The full story can be found here.
Like many climbers, we’d had our sights on Kilimanjaro for many years. When I say “we”, I mean my husband, Hilary, and I. We’ve been climbing mountains for more than 20 years, starting with the Colorado 14ers, then moving to other goals, like Colorado county high points, Colorado centennials, United States high points, and a few international and continental high points. Like every climb, Kilimanjaro would take us to a place we’ve never been before, the country of Tanzania, in Africa. Not only had we never been to Tanzania, we’d never even set foot anywhere on the continent of Africa. Since we’d be going all the way over there, we decided we’ll also do some safaris and spend time in Zanzibar, an Island off the east coast of Tanzania, where our oldest son spent a cross-cultural semester doing projects as part of his degree in conservation biology.
It turned out that both of our sons had windows in their lives that allowed them to join our climb. We raised them trekking, backpacking, camping and climbing, so it was pretty easy for them to say, “why not?”. As millennials, they were nearing the middle of their working careers, and thus able to call some shots about when and how to spend vacation time. It had been many years since we’d spent more than a couple days together as a family, so this promised to be a truly special and memorable experience.
After months of training and planning our climb, we reached the Kilimanjaro airport in Tanzania on Christmas night, December 25, 2019. We were transported to the Springlands Motel, the jumping off point for our climb. The next morning, we were introduced to our head guide, and driven to the Umbwe gate entrance to Kilimanjaro National Park, where we started our climb. The climb took six days overall, five to the top and one day to get down. The enormous mountain has all manner of climbing routes, and we chose the Umbwe route because it was a little more challenging and less travelled than other routes. It was a bit steeper generally, which is why our climbing time was pretty fast. Since we're from the front range of Colorado and spend a lot of time climbing in the Rocky Mountains, we're decently acclimatized to the high elevations compared to lowlanders that need more time. Typical days for us were 3,000 to 5,000 feet of climbing, for a total elevation gain of 13,400 feet.
Kilimanjaro is a single volcano, or rather group of three tightly spaced volcanos, that rises independently from the lush farmland in the equatorial plains of northern Tanzania. It rises through a total of six ecological zones, some of which are found nowhere else on earth. The unique diversity of flora and fauna, particularly birds, that we'd never seen before, was absolutely amazing and transforming for us. Our family climb of Kilimanjaro was a truly wonderful experience that we will always treasure!
Comments