Our daily morning routine started the same, with tea and cocoa in our tent (still standing!) at 6:30, followed by breakfast and 7:30 and departure at 8:30. The porters broke down camp after we left, and would later catch up to us and pass us by on their way to set up at the next campsite.

Our destination this day was Barranco camp, and we knew it would be a long trek—9 hours or so. We headed up a very long, uphill path from camp through the moorland/desert-like plants before passing into an area of huge boulders. There were boulders all over and they seemed to go on forever. We wound our way through the boulders and the wind whipped around us. It was very cold with the wind blowing and we bundled up with our balaclavas over our faces, but not before getting wind-burned. We tried to make our rest stops along the way in sheltered locations, behind large boulders, to protect ourselves from the wind. Hiking up until this day had, for the most part, been up the mountain, but now we were moving across the face of the mountain so we could reach the summit from the Barafu route up the South side.

We reached a top elevation of over 14,500 feet that day, but then had to head up and down—mostly down—more hills. The Western Breach of Kili was on our left as we traversed—the route for a technical ascent of the mountain. We went down a hill into a steep valley with two streams and then had another hill to go up. Joaquim said, "Last hill," but he didn’t say what was on the other side.

On the other side of the hill was a very steep descent into the Barranco Valley, with the imposing view of the Barranco Wall—which we would be climbing the next day—on the other side.

Our descent into the Barranco Valley, which rests at about 13,000 feet, took at least an hour and a half, a downhill grind I thought would never end. We did have one "high" moment on our way down, however. At one point before descending we stopped to watch mounds of white clouds roll into the valley, slowly cloaking the bottom from our view. And as the sun shone down from above us, a rainbow appeared in the valley cloud below. It was breathtaking.

Descending into the cloud was like stepping into a coastal fog. It was a surreal experience. You could only see a distance of 15 feet or so in front of you, and our guides couldn’t see where our camp was set up. After shouting and searching, the tents were located in the cloud, and we shivered from the cold as we walked into camp with cloud-dampened hair and clothing.

The air that night had a wet chill which was not pleasant. In addition, I had twisted my knee—one of the joints I was concerned with most during the trek—on the descent to camp and I was worried about the strenuous hiking still ahead of us. We retired that night in a cold, wet cloud blanket. Sometime in the early morning I woke up and stepped outside the tent. The tent was covered with ice pellets from where the mist of the cloud had frozen, and the sky was clear. It was the blackest, biggest sky I’d ever seen with countless twinkling stars. The top of the mountain rose above me and the white of the summit’s snow glowed against the black sky. Suddenly, I saw a shooting star. What an amazing moment! The memory of that moment later helped me with my struggle to reach the top.