The highest point on K-man* is 19,341 feet above sea level. That's not Everest high, but it's almost 5000' higher than the tallest mountain in the continental US, and it's 7000' higher than I've ever been without a drink cart and a flight attendant handy.
Near the top of Kilimanjaro, the air pressure available to help fill one’s lungs is very nearly half of what it is at sea level. When you inhale on the summit you’re getting only half the desired molecules of oxygen than we get down here among the mortals. The clinical term for this is hypoxia. The not-so-clinical term is suffocation, and that’s what turns most climbers back from the summit (and sometimes kills them). Without adequate O2 in the bloodstream the brain starts shutting down, which is almost always undesirable. Hypoxia sufferers tend to make very bad decisions – sometimes fatally bad. In fact, they often stop making decisions at all. They sit down to rest, and they don't get up.
It gets worse. Untreated, AMS causes edema fluids to accumulate in potentially lethal places, such as the skull and/or lungs. In the skull these fluids generate crushing, vice-like pressures on the brain. In the lungs they cause a kind of drowning by filling up all the little alveoli sacs with fluid so that air can't get in.
On average, about ten people die on Kilimanjaro each year, most from AMS or related complications. But when you consider that upwards of 40,000 people attempt to climb that beast every year, the death rate seems almost trivial, right?
Amiright?
It's beginning to dawn on me that climbing Kilimanjaro may very well be the most difficult and dangerous thing Mo' and I will ever do.
Experts claim that proper acclimatization requires an ascent of no more than 1000’ per day. At that rate, it would take at least 12 days to reach K-man’s summit from our proposed starting point. That's four days longer than the longest available route up the mountain. Sure, we could extend our climb by staying an extra night or two at some of the same campsites instead of forging ever upward each day, but that would cost time that most tourists (myself included) would rather spend seeing other parts of Africa. In addition, it's expensive to be on the mountain. We’ll be hiring a team of porters and guides to help schlep our gear to the top, and we'll be paying them by the day.
So there's just no avoiding it: Slow as we'll be going, AMS will still affect us, at least in mild-to-moderate form. We must, therefore, prepare ourselves for the Zombie Apocalypse.