Press & News

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ULTIMATE KILIMANJARO GUIDES TIM WARD, AUTHOR OF ZOMBIES ON KILIMANJARO

Ultimate Kilimanjaro successfully guided author Tim Ward and his son to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in July 2010. Soon, his experience will be available for everyone to read in Tim Ward's Zombies on Kilimanjaro, a humorous and thoughtful literary travel narrative, which will be widely published and promoted throughout the English speaking world in mid 2012. We are proud to be a part of Tim's expedition and will offer the book for sale here on our website!

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ULTIMATE KILIMANJARO FEATURED IN DOCUMENTARY TANZANIA: A FRIENDSHIP JOURNEY

In Feburary 2009, Ultimate Kilimanjaro participated in the making of Tanzania: A Friendship Journey. Ultimate Kilimanjaro successfully guided the film's subjects, Venance Ndibalema and Kristen Kenny, along with the entire Dolger Films crew to the top of Kilimanjaro. The film has won Best Documentary at the Long Island International Film Expo 2011, and Best Documentary and Best World Showcase at the Soho International Film Festival. Watch the trailer below.

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EQUIRE AUTHOR WRITES FEATURE ON HIS CLIMB WITH ULTIMATE KILIMANJARO
April 7, 2011

The Climb
by Peter Martin

One man's five-day journey up the tallest mountain in Africa...
Without any climbing experience...
Or a passion for extreme sports...
Or a need to prove anything to himself. At least not at first.

16,500 Feet
My legs burn, but it's nothing compared with my lungs. It's 1:30 in the morning, and I'm on the final push to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. For the past hour and a half, I've been plodding my way up the trail's 45 degree incline at a speed too slow for an osteoporotic grandma. Yet it's the fastest I can go. Breathing is an effort — the air up here has about half the oxygen it does at sea level. Every exhalation is a race to inhale again. I'm light-headed. With every step, my legs get more wobbly. Also, I'm stuck trying to keep pace with an ultramarathoner. For another four hours.

He's up there ahead of me on the way to Uhuru Peak, the top of the mountain. And he's probably not even winded. Rodney Cutler, a hair stylist (and Esquire's grooming writer) who gets up every day at 5:00 A.M. to bike fifty miles or jog fifteen. Who runs six miles before he does half marathons, because otherwise the races wouldn't be long enough. Who, right before he started this climb with me and seven others, ran from the coast of Kenya to Kilimanjaro's Marangu Gate: 159 miles. In six days. Because that sort of thing is fun for him. Right now, struggling to catch him, I'm not having fun at all.

The problem with climbing a mountain in the dark is that I can't see the top. I can't see much of anything, except for the little balls of light coming from the headlamps of other climbers, inching up the slope above and below me. It's disheartening. Every time I look up, I see headlamps moving in the distance. I don't know how far the mountain keeps going. Just that it keeps going.

Suddenly I can hear the guides, somewhere in the black above me. They're singing. They're clapping and dancing, shouting down to me and another climber as we struggle to reach them. It doesn't matter that they sing in Swahili, that the only word I understand is Tanzania. Hearing them sing means hearing more than just the sound of my breathing. It gives me something to focus on other than the illuminated back of the guide in front of me. Four of the other climbers, including Rodney, are up there, too, and pretty soon they're clapping and dancing right along. They yell down encouragement the way you'd cheer for a kid at his first soccer game, proud simply that he hasn't fallen down. But it's inspiring. So much so that when we get to them, suddenly everyone is hugging. I didn't start it, never would have, but in these circumstances, it feels right. I blame the altitude.

200 Feet
"Are you in shape for this?" This is the first question my boss asks me when we talk about the trip, sitting in a conference room twenty-one stories above Manhattan. And I think I am. Plus, of the seven summits — the tallest mountains on each of the seven continents — Kili (we mountaineers call it Kili) is one of the only ones that requires no technical climbing skill. Which is good, because that's exactly what I have.

Rodney has no climbing experience, either. He just likes to compete. Back in Australia, where he grew up, he played Australian-rules football for ten years. He made it to semipro, then, like any tough former athlete, turned to cutting hair. By the time he moved to the U. S., Rodney hated the idea of not training, so he started running marathons and 50k's, participating in Ironman events. When his friend Toby Tanser, a distance runner and the founder of Shoe4Africa, a charity that plans to build the first public children's hospital in Kenya, came up with the fundraising idea of running to Kili, Rodney signed on right away and began coordinating a group of nine to climb with him. I immediately said yes to his invitation, though I'm not sure why.

I don't like hiking. Not hiking for exercise, at least; that I'll save for my sixties. But trade a five-mile loop that puts you back at your car for a twenty-five-mile trek that ends at the highest point in Africa and suddenly I'm a little more interested. Kili offers an adventure — something to work toward, something to accomplish, something to casually drop in conversations when people ask what I've been up to. It seems extreme yet doable, and I want to see if I can make it. Plus, I'm curious what the point is, what'll happen when I reach the summit. Maybe it will change my perception of my scale in the world. Maybe I'll experience some kind of religious epiphany, turn into the kind of person who overuses the word majestic. If nothing else, I'll have an opportunity to see just how much a normal person can benefit from — and maybe relish — challenging himself the way Rodney does.

At 19,341 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. (Everest and others, which are up to ten thousand feet higher, are peaks in larger ranges.) It sits just inside the Tanzanian border, right next to Kenya near Africa's eastern shore, as dominant a fixture in the local economy as in the skyline.

By some estimates, twenty-five thousand people attempt to summit Kili every year. Climbing enthusiasts, charity groups, tennis legend Martina Navratilova, my aunt's new boyfriend: They all drop at least $4,000 to fly to a Third World country and live in tents for a week. They use Portland words like gorp and polypro and speak of Clif bars as if they actually tasted good. They pack prescription antidiarrhea medicine, knowing they'll most likely need it. They brave altitude sickness — a potentially fatal affliction that affects up to 75 percent of climbers and includes symptoms ranging anywhere from headache and nausea to fluid in the lungs. So it should come as no surprise that up to half don't make it to the top.

To ensure that I'm not part of that 50 percent — and to feel better about my chances of keeping up with a guy who runs a marathon in just under three hours — I resolve to overprepare. My trainer, a guy named Stu Carragher in Washington, D. C., sets me up with a six-day-a-week workout program. Plus, I get an altitude tent.

For five weeks, going to bed means climbing inside a six-foot Hypoxico tent that fits over my mattress. Each night, before I unzip the side entrance of heavy plastic and climb into bed, I turn on a keg-sized motor that pumps reduced-oxygen air into the tent for me to breathe, re-creating the atmosphere of nine thousand feet. Although it makes me feel like a patient in quarantine, the tent also causes my body to increase production of red blood cells, the cells responsible for carrying oxygen throughout the body. (Most researchers attribute Acute Mountain Sickness to the dilation of blood vessels in the brain, which can cause brain swelling. If your body processes oxygen better, those blood vessels won't have to dilate as much in search of extra oxygen, and you won't have a crushing headache — or worse.)

And there's the mask. Twice a week I hook a face mask up to the pump and crank it to twenty-one thousand feet — nearly two thousand feet higher than I'll ever get on Kilimanjaro. I start to get confident. Without altitude sickness — what one Kili climber described to me as feeling like "having the worst hangover you've ever experienced while someone kicks you in the face" — I figure what other people considered a challenge will be, for me, just a really long, really beautiful hike.

6,500 Feet
The first day of the climb begins with a bus ride — four hours of fields and villages, markets and hair salons (so many hair salons), expectant locals with a gift for expressing the bitterness they feel when the busload of mzungu with all that extra space won't stop to pick them up. The bus takes us to the Rongai route, one of the easier and less traveled of Kilimanjaro's six ascents. Our trip is planned at seven days — up Rongai and back down the paved Marangu route — but at Rodney's encouragement and out of our own desire to make it to the top, we'll trim it down to five.

As our porters weigh our bags (our duffels, which they carry, can weigh up to thirty-five pounds each; our day packs, which hold rain gear, snacks, and whatever else we want immediate access to — toilet paper, for instance — are closer to twenty), our guide, Godlisten Mkonyi, sends us up the first part of the climb, through a grove of narrow-trunked trees that soon turns into a densely canopied rain forest. The hiking is easy. And short. This is how it'll go for the first three days: Hike three to four hours before lunch (we gain about two thousand feet in elevation a day), play cards, have dinner, and go to sleep. The only real change is in the vegetation. The next morning the rain forest gives way to chest-high shrubs and grasses. Soon we'll see nothing but volcanic rock and snow. And — occasionally, when the conditions are right — Kenya.

Godlisten, as the name suggests, is a religious man. And a grateful one. For him and the other guides, in a country where a third of the population lives below the poverty line, leading a trip up Kili is a good job. The least experienced of the porters make only fifteen dollars a day; head guides make nearly ten times that. (Head guides also never get stuck carrying the shit cooler, a portable toilet set up at each camp that amounts to a toilet seat mounted on a beach cooler. It's better than the outhouses, but not by much. And only if you get there first.) Still, there's no stability. When business is good, Godlisten can lead as many as three trips a month. Otherwise, it might be only one. He has two children, both of whom he hopes will grow up to climb Kilimanjaro. But only as paying customers.

12,500 Feet
By day three, some in our group are finally feeling the altitude. One has a headache and an upset stomach. Another has constant ringing in his ears. The other notable event to occur: I finally change clothes.

15,400 Feet
On the fourth day, the ground is nothing but dirt and jagged rock. The moisture from the clouds that engulf us keeps my beard constantly wet, like I forgot to wipe my face after drinking from a water fountain. We make it to Kibo Hut, one of the main gathering points for climbers before they take a shot at the summit. It's close, a form still distant but hulking over camp. Everyone is optimistic.

In an attempt to reach the peak at sunrise — and to have enough daylight to make it to the next night's camp — most climbers leave Kibo at midnight. Godlisten wants us to try to sleep as much as we can during the day, which wouldn't be that bad if it weren't for two things: 1) The altitude is starting to affect my sleep. Whenever I start to doze off, my body jerks and I gasp for air, each time convinced that I've forgotten to breathe. (I have. It's a common high-altitude phenomenon called Cheyne-Stokes Respiration.) And 2) The porters have multiplied. With so many groups converging at Kibo Hut, each of them with ten to fifty porters (our group of nine hikers has thirty-seven porters — at least that's what they told us when it came time to tip), it feels like we're in the middle of their village. From the amount of noise coming from the barn-sized tent next to us, they must be having an auction.

16,500 Feet
After catching up with Rodney on that first ledge, after all the hugging and singing, it takes another two and a half hours to reach Gilman's Point, a false summit only ninety minutes from Uhuru Peak. The last half mile leading up to it is tough. Further complicating the 45 degree incline of the first four hours are rocks. Big rocks. And it's miserable. Every time I see our guide lift his leg to scale a rock, I'm filled with dread, knowing that I'm about to have to convince my own legs to do the same thing. Rodney pulls ahead by at least fifteen minutes.

Fifty feet after we pass the sign announcing Gilman's, I turn around to check on Jessie, the climber I've partnered with on this leg. She's vomiting. In consolation, our guide can only rub her back, hold her hair like a good sorority sister, and promise that she'll feel better. And he's right. She feels great, actually. She says so, takes a drink, then hikes for another fifteen minutes — at which point she stops and throws up again.

She's not the only one suffering. My thoughts seem distant and a little scattered. Every once in a while, it occurs to me that I wouldn't mind falling over. Plus, I've never had this much gas. (Everyone does. Something about expanding gases in the body.) With so much deep, desperate breathing going on, it's all the more reason to be glad I'm at the front of the line.

We're getting close, hiking and farting and vomiting along at what feels like a normal pace but is probably not much more than a shuffle. With the fresh snow and utter blackness, looking around is like looking at the surface of the moon. I pull out an energy bar, only to find that it's frozen solid. Up here, it's even colder than it was an hour ago, around 25 degrees Fahrenheit. It's still snowing — little ice pellets stick to everything, coating my backpack and the sunglasses dangling from my neck. Our guide tells us that we got lucky — that this is much warmer than what it could be.

Knowing that doesn't make me any less cold. We stop so I can put on a layer, and chill sets in instantly. More than thirty seconds without hiking and the cold picks through your clothes from every angle. Next to us, notched into a corner in the rocks, is a man you'd think would also be adding a layer. Instead, he's doing something else. While his friend is bent beside him, hands on his knees and gasping for breath, the man says: "I checked in on Foursquare, but I can't get Facebook to load."

Whatever happens in the twenty minutes after that, I don't really remember. After the hike, people will mention the group of guides-in-training we passed and the precipice we inched along after barely squeezing between two boulders. I won't remember these things. I'll remember only the back of our guide's shoes. I don't look up, just plod forward. I let myself go into a kind of trance, hoping that my legs won't give out, and hoping that we'll just get there. That's all I can think of: I want to be there. I want to be done climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and jump right to the part when I can tell people that I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

And then I see the summit. The simple wooden sign that marks Uhuru Peak isn't much to look at — inscribed boards, uncentered and bolted across two poles, kind of like what you'd expect to see marking a low-end dude ranch in the middle of the Southwest. But right now, due to either relief and excitement or the fact that the sun is rising over my shoulder, I'm pretty sure it's glowing. We pose for a few pictures that, back at the hotel, I will find out did not turn out. (Tip: Never take a camera you don't fully understand on a trip you want to remember.) There's more hugging. But the most interesting thing I discover at the summit: I'm a crier.

I'd have been less surprised to get to the top and find a note telling me I was adopted. Crying just isn't part of my life; feelings, when they do somehow occur, are meant to be repressed. Not here, apparently. Every time I let myself think about it — about how hard we've worked, how stunning the view is, everywhere I look — my face snarls into something hideous with emotion. After four months of working toward climbing this mountain — constantly training, sleeping in that stupid tent — I don't care. I am proud of myself. And I'm pretty sure no one saw me.

19,341 Feet
"Now run." Maybe he's being dramatic, or maybe it's the language barrier, but our guide clearly wants us to get down. It's the fastest way for Jessie to feel better. But we don't run. That would be stupid, for one thing; it's slippery up here, thanks to the loose dirt and thin layer of snow that's collected on the rocks. Also, now that the sun is up, it's hard to look around without thinking in superlatives. A few thousand feet below us, a thick layer of clouds forms the largest horizon I've ever seen. Small pockets of mist settle in the crevices of the ground's craggy surface. In the pink haze of sunrise, what was all black on the way up is now a thousands-of-years-old glacier, a mile-and-a-half-wide crater, and — holy shit — a really huge mountain.

The scale of what we just climbed becomes clearest when we get back to Gilman's Point. In the daylight, it's just plain scary. We pick our way back down the huge boulders until we get to the switchbacks. There the porters have figured out a way to make going down faster: skiing. Our guide shows us the technique, hopping from one foot to the other, with each step sliding five to ten feet in the eight inches of loose dirt covering the mountain. It's fun, sort of. Or it would be if my knees didn't hurt, if I didn't have an extra twenty pounds strapped to my back, and if it weren't down the face of the tallest mountain in Africa.

Back at camp, I have only enough time to eat a fried egg and a piece of toast. Then we're heading down. The whole way. Another twenty-one miles. We're supposed to stop and camp after six miles, finishing the next day, but everybody wants to get back to the hotel. They want real coffee, or a bed, or to trade 35 degree days for 85 degree ones. I just want to wake up to a hot shower, not a porter with a shallow plastic tub of warm water. The hike down is miserable. We're not talking at this point — not because of tension, but focus. We just want to get done. We will, eventually. In seven and a half more hours.

3,000 Feet
The day after the climb, every one of my joints requires individual coaxing to be moved. The soles of my feet are half blister. And I understand a little better why Rodney pushes himself the way he does. Had the climb never gotten as tough as it did, had it not occasionally seemed impossible, no way would it have been as rewarding. To really feel satisfied, I had to find something right at the edge of what I thought I could do. For Rodney, being content to run a 5k is kind of like a person who graduated college reading nothing but Harry Potter. He needs to be challenged. We all do. But every time he pushes his limits, those limits get just a little farther away. A 5k doesn't do it for him anymore; he has to run six marathons in a row. And then climb a mountain. "It's not so much about competition for me," Rodney says. "It's about challenging myself. It's trying to find that thing where it's really bloody hard, but it's not going to kill you."

I'll never see it that way. He's immediately on to training for his next effort whereas I want to revel in this one a little bit. I want my life to be highlighted by highlights, not made up primarily of them. For me, the most gratifying part of finishing Kilimanjaro — of doing anything this challenging, this extreme — is that I know, for sure, that I can do it, that I did do it, and that I never have to do it again.

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Small steps brings Mount Kilimanjaro climb to fruition

Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is the most dangerous thing Scott Higgins has ever done.

During the last seven hours on his ascent to the summit and with only the light of his headlamp, putting one foot in front of the other in the biting cold wind was as much of a mental challenge as it was physical. "At that point, it is mind over matter, you just keep moving," said Higgins, who climbed and trekked more than 50 miles in every type of terrain, from 90-degree temperatures in the jungle to below zero with high winds on the mountain's Uhuru Peak.

The 43-year-old Noblesville man went eight days without taking a shower and 10 days without talking to his wife, and he hiked more than 13 hours without sleep to reach his destination, Mount Kilimanjaro's peak. "I found it strangely hypnotic to climb in the darkness," said Higgins, who began his final ascent at midnight and reached the summit at sunrise. His reward was a majestic view from Africa's highest point and the world's highest free-standing mountain at 19,340 feet. "Even though I was exhausted, I knew that I would never see a sunrise like this again. The sun looked close enough to touch," he said.

Higgins stood on the snow- and ice-covered peak with the cold and wind in his face for a mere 15 minutes, due to the thin air. He witnessed climbers turning back and getting sick, and learned of two deaths from the altitude, cold and exhaustion. But he said, "I was never tempted to turn back. Given my investment of time and money, I could not accept falling short of the summit."

Higgins had no climbing experience before attempting Kilimanjaro. "However, I have never been a fan of taking baby steps," he said. "Once we made the decision to do it, the possibility of failing seemed too small to consider."

He started planning two years before the trip with friends, Travis Rassat, 36, Noblesville, and Mike Timmons, 38, Indianapolis. They joined a team consisting of eight climbers (including a father and daughter from Germany, a man from Australia, a teacher from Wisconsin and a former college professor from Virginia); and 32 support personnel of licensed guides, cooks and porters who carried gear, set up tents and cleaned up camps. Higgins booked their trip through Ultimate Kilimanjaro, a private agency. The trip cost about $6,000: one-third for the guide service, one-third for airfare and the rest for gear, immunizations, passports and spending money.

Higgins and two friends sent a care package filled with cold weather gear and cash over the holidays after seeing the guides' and porters' worn and ill-fitting coats. "It's something we intend to do every year," he said. "The relatively small donation we send to Africa goes quite far over there."

The trek required a level of physical fitness, endurance and a realistic awareness of risks. Higgins lost 13 pounds over the 12 days in Africa due to the loss of appetite, which is a common side effect of altitude sickness. Before the trip, he spent many hours hiking with a 40-pound backpack, walking at an incline on the treadmill and running bleachers at a soccer stadium.

He was on Kilimanjaro for eight days, Aug. 2-10, and reached the summit the seventh day by taking the Lemosho Route, the mountain's newest and most scenic path. He's already talking about the next mountain-climbing trip to South America's Aconcagua. Aconcagua is the highest mountain in the Americas, at 22,841 feet. "It seems like a perfect choice."

Higgins hopes to climb the highest mountains on six of the seven continents, except for Asia's Mount Everest, which requires a more costly permit.

Higgins took about 400 photos and captured about 180 minutes of video. He had intended to journal a significant amount of time everyday but was too tired to capture more than a paragraph or two each night.

The mountain lies 205 miles south of the equator and stands on Tanzania's northern border with Kenya. Kilimanjaro is made up of three extinct volcanoes and supports six ecological zones, from dry fields and farms to steaming jungles, exotic heaths and moorlands to an alpine desert and a glaciated summit.

As a youngster, Higgins became fascinated with the mountain that was immortalized in Ernest Hemingway's almost-autobiographical short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in 1936 in Esquire and in 1987 as part of Hemingway's short stories collection. "After reading that story, I knew that someday I would have to see Kilimanjaro for myself," said Higgins, a 1985 Elwood High School graduate.

Higgins also wanted to see Kilimanjaro's shrinking glaciers. "I really wanted to see them before they were gone," said the business executive and adjunct professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, where he earned his master of business administration.

When he started talking about the trip, his family's response was skepticism. Once they understood it was more than just talk, their next question was "why?"

The married father of two teenagers -- Anna, 18, and Natalie, 16 -- had no experience climbing. "But as the months went by, and he was purchasing his equipment, I realized he was serious," said Lori Higgins, 43, who met her husband when they were Ball State University students. They've been married 22 years. She didn't clearly understand the magnitude of the mountain until watching a cable TV program about Kilimanjaro. She worried for her husband's safety, but she recognized his need to climb the mountain. "In my mind, I knew he could do it. He's the strongest, most determined man I know. I couldn't be more proud of his accomplishment."

Once Scott Higgins made the decision to climb Kilimanjaro, he said, "The possibility of failing seemed too small to consider." He said, "When we are young, there is a belief that there will be time for everything in the future. As we age, the realization sets in that our days are numbered, and if an opportunity exists to experience something important, we had better jump on it."

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ULTIMATE KILIMANJARO CLIENT FEATURED IN NORTH JERSEY'S DAILY NEWSPAPER
April 28, 2010

Teacher training to scale Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise funds for cancer

For some people, summer vacation marks an escape from the hustle and bustle of the daily grind, but for Keith Perkins, it satisfies a much deeper craving. When his father passed away in 2007 from pancreatic cancer at age 72, Perkins became shocked after learning about the high mortality rate associated with this type of cancer. There is no reliable detection method available, resulting in diagnosis emerging in the later stages. Being armed with this knowledge, Perkins felt a need to contribute in hopes of generating awareness to the cause. Combine that with a dream of scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro and you have the makings of quite a compelling journey.

An English teacher by trade, Perkins, 40, adores the writings of Ernest Hemingway, who is noted for his fictional accounts of Mt. Kilimanjaro."I've had a mini-obsession with Mt. Kilimanjaro since my early 20s," said Perkins, who teaches at Wayne Hills High School. Besides the literary draw, Kilimanjaro, with its six ecological zones, ranging from steamy rainforests to alpine deserts, all reaching towards a glacial summit, also offers a geographical intrigue that Perkins continues to hold close to his heart.

But how you combine a fundraising effort with climbing one of the biggest mountains in the world was the million-dollar question. And after meticulous online research, Perkins had the answer - www.ultimatekilimanjaro.com and www.pancan.org." The website ultimatekilimanjaro.com is a company based in Chicago that helps you to plan your mountain excursion and pancan.org is the official fundraising website for pancreatic cancer. They're two separate entities," Perkins explained.

The hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro, located in Tanzania, Africa, will take place Aug. 1-8. This route is longer by one day, however Perkins feels it necessary to allow ample time for his body to adapt to the high elevation, as many have fell victim to the thin air near the summit. "I'm trying to be realistic about it," said Perkins. Pre-training is a huge part of the climb as Mt. Kilimanjaro, which measures 19,340 feet, is an enormous undertaking for even the most athletic person, as altitude sickness, fatigue, and other physical ailments can easily occur. Currently Perkins, who has participated in marathons in the past, is running and walking before conquering longer hikes while wearing an equated amount of weight on his back.

The itinerary is carefully planned out and led by local escorts known as sherpas, who understand the need of a controlled environment based on the fluctuating altitude. Luckily they also assume most of the baggage, leaving climbers to carry only a small amount of added weight. "They're available to help you and keep an eye out as you progress towards the higher altitudes," Perkins said. "You can be in the best shape of your life, but once you get higher up, anything can happen so I'm approaching it super serious."

Leaving no stone unturned, he even researched medications and discovered diamox, which is widely used by mountaineers who venture into high altitudes. And since Perkins' adventure will initially take him though a jungle atmosphere, malaria pills and an inoculation for yellow fever are also necessary. His journey begins with a 30-hour flight to Tanzania with two stops. Weather conditions as he and the other trekkers begin ascending Mt. Kilimanjaro will become progressively colder as the days go on, despite the close proximity to the equator. "I'll start out wearing short sleeves and before arriving near the summit I'll surely be wearing winter clothing," he said, smiling.

Those who've mustered through the climb to reach the summit have reflected on a magnificent site never to be forgotten. And despite a gallant venture, trekkers are only allowed to stay at the top for no longer than 10 minutes before the high altitude eventually takes its toll. After his mountain excursion, Perkins will be taking a five-day safari through the Serengeti National Park before returning home on Aug. 14. "This trip isn't just for me, it's also for my dad and the countless others who've battled pancreatic cancer," said Perkins. "But when it's your family, you're more passionate about it."

[Keith Perkins successfully reached Uhuru Point on August 7, 2010.]

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ULTIMATE KILIMANJARO GUIDES HONG KONG CELEBRITIES TO TOP OF KILIMANJARO
March 3, 2010

Project C:Change Website

On February 18, 2010, the Project C:CHANGE expedition team successfully made it to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. The six member team scaled Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, to raise HK $600,000 for charity and raise awareness about man-made climate change.

The climbers on the Project C:CHANGE expedition included Hong Kong celebrity models Rosemary Vandenbroucke, Jocelyn Luko, Anthony Sandstrom, as well as Janice Chia, Jack Brockway and expedition leader Sean Lee Davies.

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LOVEALL FOUNDATION TEAM SUMMITS WITH ULTIMATE KILIMANJARO
January 6, 2010

Loveall Foundation Kilimanjaro Challenge Website

The Loveall Foundation for Children is a non-profit organization established to benefit under privileged, abused or other children with special needs. The Loveall Foundation climbed Kilimanjaro in an effort to raise money for the Leukemia Society, to benefit children battling leukemia. In the video below, Jacques Loveall, founder of the Loveall Foundation for Children, speaks about his team's upcoming climb with Ultimate Kilimanjaro. The team successfully summited on January 6, 2010.

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ULTIMATE KILIMANJARO CITED IN THE HERALD (UK)
March 12, 2009

How to plan on hitting heights

Gear
Most travel companies will provide all the camping, cooking and communal equipment. They will also provide a comprehensive list of what you should bring including waterproof jackets, hiking boots, trekking poles, gloves, a sleeping bag and a sun hat. See www.ultimatekilimanjaro.com for more.

Training
You should start training at least two months before your departure, although many people begin training up to a year before. Good general aerobic fitness can be achieved through a variety of sports but regular hiking is obviously the best way to build up leg muscles. If you don't live near hills, a step machine is a good alternative. However, for many the toughest physical element is coping with altitude which is something which cannot be prepared for.

Medical
All climbers should get a medical check with their own doctor prior to attempting the climb. It is recommended that you are vaccinated against hepatitis A and B, malaria, meningococcal (meningitis), rabies, typhoid and yellow fever.

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ULTIMATE KILIMANJARO QUOTED IN WASHINGTON POST
September 28, 2007

Beyond the Grand Canyon: Five More Active Adventures

Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

Ascending this 19,340-foot mountain doesn't involve ropes, snap links and other accouterments of the hard-core mountain climb. Essentially the Tanzanian ascent is a long, thin-aired walk -- it can easily take you a week or more -- requiring strong legs and loads of stamina. The best preparation for hiking mountains is to ... well, hike a mountain, according to the Web site UltimateKilimanjaro.com (www.ultimatekilimanjaro.com). Train in the hiking boots and day pack you plan to use on the trip. Long-distance walking can build stamina. And as with the Inca Trail, you must prepare for the thin air and sickness it could provoke.

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