We're taking a trek as an intentional journey, a little trail down there at the bottom, as an intentional journey to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Because my husband had a passion, I got that passion, remembered how much I wanted to climb. As a child, I set the intention to climb eight mountains in eight months.
My husband in yellow, I'm with the pink gloves on the back, and we're climbing up. This is a little video that I'm going to show you. And off to the right, you're going to see a very low drop off. Do you see that right now?
Now, just right, look to your right, keep looking to your right, as it goes, you're going to see a hole, right there. Now I was so focused on hiking that I didn't know I was on the edge of the crater. And that drop off, I didn't even notice it, it was very early in the morning, and I had to, only take a step after the person in front of me and figure out what I was going to do next. So, it's a little bit dangerous at times, and you have to be very careful that you don't get too excited and overwhelmed. And now I'm looking back at the people behind me, you can hear the wind. And you can tell that we have to take a break. There's only, so many steps you can take at that level at that altitude before you have to take a break. So, I went all the way to the end so we can keep going. I didn't think this would go on that long.
Next, we got to 18,652 feet. Okay, so there's three different points on Mount Kilimanjaro that you can say you're at the top, because a lot of people don't get higher than this first point. So, they have a sign there. We were at Gilman point. And they served as tea and crumpets I know, right, very exciting. And then we walk into that fog. And as we walked into the fall, we came to another sign. Now the second sign says Stella point, it's going to show up in just a minute.
It's the one that a lot of people get to because it's 80,885 feet, it's only a few 100 feet, not even 100 feet higher than Gilman point. But a lot of people give up here. Now have you noticed that the climb, if you look up the very top to the right, follow the line of the hill up to the right, that is the summit. But it takes an hour and a half to get there, it's already two o'clock in the afternoon. So, what we do is we walk into a fog and we start climbing into our base camp. And this camp is at 18,500. So, we actually went down a little bit, those rocks in this picture are not as big as you would think they could be, and in this particular picture, we just had a four-hour white out, and the snow was everywhere. We expected this. Okay, that's our guide, and it's just moving us through the snow part telling us what we have to do next. It's quite the world out there. It is a very difficult day.
In fact, we were so happy to take our nap that we got, we acted like we were drunk. That's how bad that oxygen was. And as you see that, I started to make a video for him, for his Chatto for where he works in California, and we could barely talk. So, we've only been walking from four, five o'clock in the morning until one o'clock, two o'clock in the afternoon. And we could barely function. Alright, here's how the tent is, there's snow Everywhere I know, right? I'm going to go outside to see what's there. And I was, nobody else was awake. So, making noise with the zipper was kind of annoying to everybody else. But look at that. It was over, is that great? Is that not beautiful? There's about six to eight inches of snow everywhere. And we are in the volcano crater to sleep on Mount Kilimanjaro. And he's going to attempt to get up, it's very hard to get out of these tents, you have to bend over and put your boots on, put your layers on and start taking a walk. So, I'm going to go fast forward to the end of that, where you now see, you're going to see very exciting footprints in the snow. And then the glaciers.
Those are the glaciers at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. And those are Norwegians climbing over there after us. But those are about 35 feet tall. And they're not the typical glacier. There are many other glaciers on the mountain. But these are the ones that are in the crater. This is what they look like up close. They're actually very beautiful. This is about four o'clock in the afternoon. And when you get a chance to see through them, and realize that you're at the top of the world, it's pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. The sun was setting and we were going to need to go to sleep early, have an early dinner, because we're getting up again at five o'clock to summit Mount Kilimanjaro. Yes, all the sunsets in Africa are amazing. This is again, the glacier, and this is the snow melting up there. And it has changed a lot over the years, depending on the year. Depends on the sunset, depends on who's climbing. It depends on the weather, right? The mountain lets you climb or it doesn't let you climb.
Now I'm sitting, standing at the base, and I'm pointing up. And when you see me pointing up, I'm pointing to what I think is the summit. We actually go right up that snowbank kind of Criss cross back and forth, like you would ski down. I can't see the trail, but there's sort of one there. And then the next morning, it's about 5:45, six o'clock in the morning. There's no sun, it's just a cloud. They tell me I won't see the sun that day because of the snow. And I said no, no, I'm going to see the sun. And they said No, you're not. And I say yes, I am. So right, that top rock that you see is, what they call the fault summit. So, I'm below and I'm looking up towards it. And once you get to the false summit, you're going to see that it's quite wide, you're going to see a bunch of glaciers in the background. So, you do have to do a little squinting here. The squinting is only because this is taking so long to do. So, I have to see what's there and you see some pink in the sky, the sky becomes kind of like Sherbert ice cream, when Sherbert ice cream is very kind of pink and orange at the same time. And if you look carefully, you can see a bunch of bumps off, the off the edge and those are more glaciers. This is a slightly better picture of the glaciers.
They're everywhere across the top of the mountain. And this is 2015. I understand it's changed a lot in 2020. And when that changes, and you look down to where you came from, you realize that the 45 minutes' walk that you had was quite treacherous. You can see the pattern if you can, there's a little tiny black line that kind of runs down and squiggly down there to the to the bottom of the crater. So, the idea of an 800-foot climb was really a blessing because other people would climb at 5000 feet that day, we didn't have to, we had slept in the crater. And when you sleep in the crater and you wake up, you can see this gorgeous set of glaciers. And we're just so fortunate to be at the top of the world.
When we get there. It's going to be 19,341 feet; you see the sun setting there. And it was so foggy that we could see other people coming up the other side that didn't sleep in the glacier. And then you see us, and up behind our head is a shadow and that shadow is the actual summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. I'm in the front, I'm like a friend was carrying my path at that point, dawn here and then or other people. I'm looking backwards adjusting his GoPro and the sun came up. It was so exciting. As we're going to go towards that summit. It's about the size of three football fields. So, as we climbed and got to the top, our group was excited. And this girl here in the yellow in the center, from snow and the white hat from South Africa, has a Candy Company. So, she had to have her sign up for her Candy Company. And the rest of us are just enjoying being at the summit. 19,341 feet of Mount Kilimanjaro, which repeat in Tanzania.
Alright, so we've done all that. And I want to stop sharing. Because what I think is most important about today is Everyday Intentions. Create what you want. This is the 4th Day of HOPE, Help Others, Help Yourself with Optimum Health. Others Need your Kindness, share it. People Need Creative Adventures to be Inspired. Everyday Intentions, create what you want.
I couldn't be more excited to spend this time with you. It went a little bit long with the extra slideshow but I don't care. I love passionately doing what I'm built to do. Now we're going to start tomorrow with H and we're going to spell HOPE three times and then it will be Christmas. Thank you so much for joining me. I am so excited to have been sharing this time with you. Have an awesome day.
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