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Kilimanjaro

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Another Group's Bout with HAPE
Wednesday, December 29, 1999

Todd
Burleson
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Today we came up from Barranco — excuse me, from Shira. We hiked up from 12,500 — left all the vegetation behind and now in the high alpine environment. Basically it's amazing walking through a bunch of lava boulders all over the place. It's very surreal looking with Kilimanjaro towering above us. We went to about 14,500 feet. We traversed along the base of the mountain and then descended into the Barranco Valley which is right at the base of the Breach Wall with Messner's Icicles hanging up above us. Absolutely gorgeous right now. The sun just set a few minutes ago, I was just looking at the Southern Cross...[Unintelligible]...and it's beautiful here.

When we got to camp there was a case of pulmonary edema from another group, with no Western guide. Quite sick. Really, really, quite sick. So we set up an evacuation and hopefully he'll be okay. You know he had a 125 pulse, throwing up blood, and it was a bad situation. Just, people not using their heads and taking care...[Unintelligible]...hopefully he'll be fine now.

Everything is great here. The camp's beautiful. We've have about six other teams here. We're camped fairly close together, but it's great — it's a lot like Everest Base Camp for me, except that there's camp fires and it's not freezing. But it's beautiful here.

We look forward to a great climb tomorrow. We're only going to go about four hours. We'll hike up a steep wall where we actually do some, literally, rock climbing. It's more like steep scrambling where we spot each other over boulder moves and we'll go up a couple thousand feet and descend into the Karanga Valley and camp there tomorrow night. But all 16 of us are doing great. Everyone's completely excited about summitting on the millennium. Everyone's in top health and top form so we hope we'll have everybody standing on top in a few days. Hope everyone's good there. Bye-bye.

Todd Burleson, Alpine Ascents Founder Reporting for MountainZone.com



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