Brenna Knowles, an Environmental Studies/English major, received a Sol Feinstone Award to combine research on environmental issues and enviornomental literature in Kenya with a climb to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. She combined her experiences from the Kenya Semester Program with her Feinstone research to write a nature essay about her climb. Below are excerpts from her journal and photographs from her climb up Mount "Kili."
Glacier on Uhuru Peak:
Our guide, Wilson explained to us that thirty years ago, the mountain had snow down to Horombo. Now there is none, and only a few traces at the Kibo camp. The glaciers are receding rapidly, especially in the last ten years. Wilson said we might be able to hear them since they make a lot of noise as they melt, crack and break apart.
A New York Times article that came out in the Spring of 2001 reveals that the glaciers are retreating at such a pace that they will disappear in less than fifteen years. One test spot has lost a yard since last February and 82% of the total icecap has been lost since it was first carefully surveyed in 1912. Scientists say that it is one of the clearest signs that global warming in the last fifty years appears to have exceeded typical climate shifts and that it is likely some natural changes were affecting the glacier before it felt human induced heat. (Revkin, 2001)
In 1899 German explorer Hans Meyer wrote that the crater rim would be bare rock in two or three decades and Kilimanjaro would be devoid of ice. (Reader, 1982) So far, things are on schedule for his prediction to be accurate.
View
of Mawenzi from Kibo Huts:
Wilson also told us a story about two Austrians who had terrible luck climbing
Mawenzi's cluster of craggy pinnacles. Wilson said as a little boy, he remembered
search planes circling the area, looking for the two climbers. The two were
attempting a technical route and both fell, one maybe trying to rescue the other.
Their ropes would not allow them to repel. Wilson said they were lucky if the
fall killed them and not the cold. Gunmen had to be called in to shoot the ropes
and release the climbers from their suspended graves.
Uhuru Peak: Brenna Knowles '02, Brent Freeman, '01, Gina Gebhart, Washington University, Hanif Paroo Seattle, WA, Wilson, Marangu, Kenya
The sun was coming up over the horizon and the day was beginning to warm.
All of a sudden the clouds shifted and we could see into Kilimanjaro's enormous crater. Three glaciers and hundreds of miles of Africa were revealed all at once! Words of Barry Lopez reminded me that "each day we are upended if not by some element of the landscape itself then by what the landscape does visibly to each of us." This sunrise snapped me like a fresh laundered sheet.
