It was after midnight on the icy slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. A frigid wind sliced across my cheeks as I tightened the drawstrings of my parka. A sliver of moon hung above a sweep of cloud so far below us that it felt as if we were looking down from space. My dad trudged a few paces ahead, his breath visible in the cold. We were on the final stretch to the summit and feeling every bit of the more than 19,000 feet we’d climbed. At 16, I wasn’t yet sure of much, but I knew I wanted to be there climbing that mountain with him, despite the blisters on my feet and the altitude headache.
Ascending Kilimanjaro is like hiking through an entire continent’s worth of ecosystems. We started in the cultivation zone, winding past villages where crops thrived in rich volcanic soil, then entered lush, humid rainforest alive with birdsong. Higher up, the landscape shifted to moorland, with giant heather shrubs rising like sculptures against an endless sky. In camp, my dad and I would sit shoulder to shoulder as our steadfast porters ladled out steaming bowls of hearty soup. Afterward, I’d pull out my Walkman and its single worn tape and share one headphone with a porter, trading music from home for their stories of life on the mountain. At night, bone-tired and tucked into our tiny tent, my father and I drifted off while listening to the wind race across the slope.
The trip was born out of a simple idea of my dad’s: When each of his kids turned 16, we could choose anywhere around the globe to go, just the two of us. It was his way of giving us the world, or at least opening the door to it. He’d spent his own childhood in a humble lakeside port town in Michigan, where summer meant swimming in Lake Huron and playing tennis on cracked public courts. Family vacations were road trips to visit relatives in Florida, and during my early childhood, our travels were similarly modest. But as he built his business and began to dream bigger for my brother and me, he created this new tradition.
At the time, I had recently finished reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and like so many teenage athletes, I was enamored with the idea of testing myself. Kilimanjaro, the most accessible of the Seven Summits, felt epic but achievable. We trained by loading weights into backpacks and walking miles through our suburban Michigan neighborhood, the two of us an absurd sight to passing minivans.
