Climb Kilimanjaro with Team Kilimanjaro

 

Team Kilimanjaro has redefined the Kilimanjaro market by bringing the operational standards and procedures of a dedicated crew of world class mountaineers, athletes and adventure specialists to Mount Kilimanjaro. At the widely acclaimed forefront of high altitude performance Team Kilimanjaro has pioneered unique ascent strategies carefully conceived to maximise your personal safety and summit chances on Africa’s highest mountain and the world’s largest non-massif mountain.

How to contact Team Kilimanjaro >>

 

NEW: Interactive features for our Kilimanjaro climbers

 

• Track a friend or relative on their trek with our Kilimanjaro GoogleMap.
• Friends and relatives wanting to monitor the health and progress of our climbers while they climb Kilimanjaro, can offer words of encouragement  via the Kilimanjaro blog.
• Keep an eye on Kilimanjaro’s weather as you prepare to fly out.
• New climbers can find many open dates to join here.
• Solo climbers or small groups wanting to expand their booking numbers to qualify for lower prices can advertise their climb dates on our new Facebook page.

 

Mount Kilimanjaro

 

While Kilimanjaro is one of the world’s largest topographical features, none of the six routes requires any technical skills or specialist equipment to climb, (though for Western Breach climbers we recommend that some supplementary equipment be considered). And although the height gained from the different start points to Kilimanjaro’s peak at 5,895m is around 15% greater than from Mount Everest’s southern Base Camp to its summit, climbing Kilimanjaro does not require the use of slow and arduous Himalayan-style siege tactics, or of supplemental oxygen. It is therefore a perfectly manageable - and hugely fulfilling - challenge within the context of just a week or two’s holidays - provided the climber has found enough time to do some fitness and endurance training at home beforehand.

 

For those as yet entirely unacquainted with the mountain, Kilimanjaro is a volcano situated quite close to where Africa’s three main tectonic plates meet. For perhaps distantly historical reasons, there remains a widespread misconception that Kilimanjaro is either in Kenya or at least straddles the Kenyan-Tanzanian border. This is not true, however, as the mountain sits entirely within Tanzania and is managed by the Tanzania National Park Authority, through the local administration of the Kilimanjaro National Park Authority. There is therefore no sense in which a Kilimanjaro expedition can be launched from within Kenya, and all attempts must be registered at either Londorossi (Shira and Lemosho Routes), Machame (Machame and Umbwe Routes), or Marangu Gates (Marangu and Rongai Routes), in Northern Tanzania.

 

Climbing Kilimanjaro

 

Unlike mountainous regions in most of the developed countries of the world, Kilimanjaro cannot be accessed solo, or without paying fees and subscribing to local regulations. We are sympathetic to the objections of some climbers against the stringent constraints of timings, movement and method, that are imposed by these regulations, but it should nonetheless please be understood that the National Parks of Tanzania - including Kilimanjaro - are resources that are costly to preserve intact, and that the entrance fees that they accrue are a very valuable source of revenue to a grateful country that suffers a GDP per capita of approximately just 1.3% of that of the UK, and that in order safely to manage the sought-after high volumes of climbers that attempt the mountain every year (between 20,000 and 35,000), the authorities deem it necessary to exert a very careful degree of control over factors such as camp locations and direction of travel.

 

While we are often told by those who have climbed with us - including professional athletes - that they underestimated how difficult it would be to climb Kilimanjaro and that it turned out to be one of the hardest things they had ever done in their lives, in spite of this, almost anyone who is willing to train two or three times a week for three months, and who is strongly self-motivated and does not give up easily when faced with hardship and discomfort, would be expected to reach Uhuru Peak.

 

That said, we encourage readers to explore this website in some detail, as there are nonetheless some inevitable - but largely mitigable - risks to the health and safety of climbers on Kilimanjaro, that every climber should be aware of. Such risks include the onset of Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) and its possible development to life-threatening conditions such as pulmonary or cerebral oedema (HAPE and HACE), if not identified and treated at the earliest stages - a process that largely requires the climber’s own cooperation and communication - as well as non-lethal threats that can compromise an otherwise successful ascent, such as failure to anticipate the extent to which low oxygen environments inhibit circulation, meaning that in spite of the fact that a climber has previously experienced comfort while wearing ski gloves at minus 15 degrees Centigrade when skiing at 2,000 metres, at 5,000 metres they will nonetheless risk frostbite at only minus 10 unless they wear generously filled down mittens, or similar. Such considerations are not obvious or extrapolatable from non-altitude related pursuits and since we have encountered many disappointed climbers on Kilimanjaro who did evidently not consult their organiser in very great depth, we would emphasise the extent to which early and detailed communication with your chosen expedition coordinator is in your best interests, if wanting to summit comfortably and safely.

 

Kilimanjaro Routes

 

All climbers on Kilimanjaro are required to climb via one of only six officially sanctioned routes. These are, from west to east, Shira, Lemosho, Machame, Umbwe, Marangu, and Rongai. The western routes, (Shira, Lemosho, Machame and Umbwe), are required by KINAPA to descend via the Umbwe Route, a descent-only route, while the eastern routes, (Marangu and Rongai), must descend via the Marangu Route. Climbers are required - via their tour operator - to inform the park authorities which route they are electing to use, and are not permitted to switch routes while on the mountain.

 

Although there are only six ‘routes’ on Kilimanjaro, that is only to say that there are six different locations from which it is permitted to begin an ascent of Kilimanjaro. Provided that the correct descent route is used, there is actually a very high number of possible route permutations that can be followed, particularly on longer climbs. Rongai, for example, has at least 11 variations along which we could configure a climb, if asked to. But although there is a great deal of route choice available, very few of the available options can be argued to be intelligent, or in any way optimal. It should be remembered that when the original standard routes were originally built, there was virtually no input from mountaineers, and route selection was simply a matter of how obstacles of topography and vegetation might most simply be overcome. The consequence of such limited route selection criteria means that the standard route options that have evolved are generally very poor in mountaineering terms.

 

In terms of general year-round usage, since none of the original routes were deemed by Team Kilimanjaro to be acceptable in terms of incorporating sufficient exploitable topography with respect to the principles of safe and thorough acclimatisation; minimising exposure to crowds, and enhancing prospects for wildlife confrontation, we were constrained to develop entirely new route variants, that until very recently, were used only by our climb teams. These routes still remain almost exclusive to us, with only a very small handful of fellow operators having decided to follow suit. By far our most successful route to date has been TK Rongai, which we designed in January 2007, with 61% of our climbers choosing to use that route last year. TK Rongai works extremely well throughout most of the year, having the greatest climb-high, sleep-low differential of all the mountain’s route variants, but it shares a crowded summit assault with Shira, Lemosho, Machame and Umbwe, in the very busiest months, and cannot be accessed in the wettest months; so route choice is not necessarily obvious, and we strongly advise close consultation with our coordinators.

 

Our expedition coordinators will be very happy to assist with your route selection, however we advise climbers to begin with quite a comprehensive assessment of their options, by perusing our page on ‘how to choose your Kilimanjaro route’.

 

Team Kilimanjaro

 

This is probably where we are expected to say that Team Kilimanjaro are the best Kilimanjaro tour operators, and that our company has the best guides and offers the best treks on Kilimanjaro; but apart from being perceived as rather arrogant and a bit simplistic, to actually say such things would be very repugnant to us (regardless of what we actually believed), so we regret that we will have to leave our good readers to reach their conclusions independently of our subjectivity.

 

To find out more about our people please see the following pages:

 

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