Hiking Mt Kilimanjaro Day 4 - Lava Tower

I finally got a decent night's sleep and the headache subsided slightly.  Our lead guide took our vitals in the morning and my oxygen levels were definitely starting to dip into the high 80s percentile, for that elevation he said it was completely normal and we were all still within normal ranges.  It's still really weird to think about the oxygen levels being anything below 98%.  We were rewarded though with remarkable view of the sister mountain next to us, Mount Meru!  Mount Meru is also in the Arusha National Park and summits at a very respectable 14,977ft.  Mount Meru is a whole different beast of a climb and it's own accolade, maybe another time...

Today's mission would be another acclimatization hike to an area called Lava Tower.  Mount Kilimanjaro is made up of three dormant volcanoes and Lava Tower is actually a byproduct of one of those previous eruptions.  Lava Tower (as the name suggests) is now a large volcanic rock which acts as a natural cork to hold the lava in the mountain!  With such an awesome name we were excited to get to the goal.  We are now in the 4th climate zone known as the "Highland Desert".  Little to no more vegetation can be seen, and we were surrounded by rocks.  The elevation definitely started to get to me as the hikes became tougher.  At certain points throughout the hike we got a "sneak peak" called Lava Tower (seen in the 2nd picture below).

We finally got to Lava Tower!  Seeing it up close was an impressive sight.  This was our lunch spot for the day and we only spent about 30-40 minutes there.  Apparently this was the planned camp site for us the next night.  It was really windy when we were up there, and other camps were setting up there already.  Lava Tower camp gets freezing at night because of the wind.  The plan was to hike back a couple of hours and go to a camp site we've already passed.  We started thinking about our options of what we could do to potentially summit a day earlier.

After lunch we went back towards our camp for the night!  It was the exact same terrain that we saw on the way up, but there was a fork towards our camp.  After we returned to the camp after this long day we were greeted by something wonderful!  We were greeted by a cheer, a song, and a dance with our team!  They met us about a mile up from our camp and helped us back down to the camp and the celebrations began!

This was also a pretty empty campsite with only 1 other small group there.  The clouds cleared up at night and it  gave me another chance to snap another picture of the Milky Way.  Ahh the memories!

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