A:
Hello, Emabeck. I think by "best" route, most climbers refer to the route by which they are most likely to summit, but which will also allow them to experience as much as possible of the beauty of Kilimanjaro. With this in mind, we would suggest that you scrutinise recommendations for Machame, Umbwe, and the standard Lemosho Routes very carefully indeed, as while Machame and standard Lemosho have very good acclimatisation if timings and movements are configured optimally by your operator, nonetheless, they all suffer from the same pitfall which can significantly impact your summit chances. The issue is that after all three of these routes converge at Barranco, they follow a course that requires traversing three spurs and tributaries in succession, to the east of The Breakfast Wall. The highly undesirable consequence of this is that the trekker is therefore required to waste some 401 metres of hard-earned vertical height gain on the day immediately preceding what for many people will be the hardest day of their lives. Having organised a number of world record attempts on which candidates are always seeking to push the boundaries with respect to what can be achieved at high altitude, and having overseen more than 10,000 successful summits on Kilimanjaro what has become very, very clear is that success at high altitude is a matter of balancing what are effectively two opposing variables: Variable A. On the one hand, climbers need to input the additional effort required to ensure that they acclimatise adequately. This usually entails evening excursions to a higher altitude than where one sleeps at night, and of course necessitates a little extra calorific expenditure. However… Variable B. On the other hand, prolonged exposure to high altitude has a physiologically deleterious effect, meaning that when we remain at above 3,000 metres for several days, the body doesn’t adequately recover from expended effort and suffers from accumulated fatigue that can only be relieved by descent to much lower altitude. Our criticism of Machame, for instance, and the reason that fewer than 5% of the expeditions that I organise use that route, (whereas some 38.5% of trekkers across the board use Machame) is that while Machame (and standard Lemosho and Umbwe for that matter) satisfy the criterion of Variable A, the route performs appallingly with respect to Variable B, and climbers typically arrive into high camp (Barafu) with substantially depleted physical reserves available to be expended on the arduous summit bid. To counter this failing, we recommend two alternative routes, “TK Lemosho” and “TK Rongai”. You can find these routes on Google Maps by search for “T K Lemosho Trail” and “T K Rongai Trail”. In a nutshell, TK Lemosho begins with standard Lemosho from the gate to Shira I, but then instead of continuing to Shira I, it diverts to Moir Camp, above which you are able to exploit the topography of the Lent Group of outcrops that afford around 300 metres of climb-high sleep-low differential, which is an excellent balance between on the one hand expending a little extra effort to achieve adequate acclimatisation, while on the other not over-exerting oneself to the detriment of maintaining those precious physical reserves required for the summit assault. Beyond Moir, we use what is also known as the “Northern Circuit” to attain 3rd Cave Camp. The route to 3rd Caves from Moir is superb in terms of maintaining balance between the aforementioned variables, in the sense that there is virtually no wasted height gain, the body is able to adapt well to 4,000 metres over a 17km stretch of extremely mild topographical undulations - and all at an altitude slightly lower than was already visited on Day 4’s evening acclimatisation excursion! What absolutely consolidates TK Lemosho as the ultimate route in terms of acclimatisation, maintenance of reserves, and crowd avoidance is the final pertinent fact of the assault being launched from School Hut, as opposed to Kibo or Barafu. The issues with launching the summit bid from Kibo Hut or Barafu Camp are twofold: 1. The going is relatively inefficient from Barafu and extremely inefficient from Kibo Huts, with significant traction being lost in each stride while ascending, further depleting summit reserves. 2. Crowding on these assault routes makes it difficult to maintain an efficient cadence. On the summit bid it is impossible for most climbers to maintain continual vertical progress with regular stops being necessitated to allow the heart rate to remain within an acceptable range - bearing in mind that at around 5,000 metres we have only around 60% of the oxygen in each breath that we are used to at sea level. When on a narrow, crowded trail, it therefore becomes a stressful and enervating exercise in diplomacy when having constantly to stand aside while resting for other climbers on the move, and vice versa. Conversely, assaulting from School Hut means that we a) bypass the loose scree above Kibo and - to a lesser extent - Barafu, by making use of a firm, diagonal slope with excellent going, until we reach Hand Meyer Cave, from where the ground is thereafter firm, and b) avoid all crowding, as from Hans Meyer Cave the initially dense distribution of groups now becomes spaced far apart. I realise I’ve only briefly touched on the subject, but please feel free to enquire further and I’ll be very happy to elaborate on my recommendation. And by the way, while TK Lemosho has the best summit prospects in my view, the descent (via Mweka) is not suitable for those carrying old knee and ankle injuries. For those with such injuries we recommend TK Rongai, which diverges very radically from standard Rongai and enjoys many of the benefits of TK Lemosho, though sadly not a beautifully dense, populous rain forest section as TK Lemosho does.
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