We Were Not Ready. We Went Anyway. Mount Kenya-By Kazim Ciftci-Turkey

A group of friends, a dormant volcano, and everything that went wrong — and right — on Mount Kenya.

Nobody tells you that the hardest part of climbing Mount Kenya isn’t the altitude. It’s the group chat.

Six of us. Three cities. Four different opinions on what “light packing” means. One shared delusion that we were, in some meaningful sense, prepared.

We were not prepared.

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How It Started (Like These Things Always Do)

It started with a screenshot.

Someone — I won’t name names, but his name rhymes with “Brian” — dropped a photo of Lenana Point into our WhatsApp group at 11pm on a Tuesday. Golden hour. Ice-capped peaks. A tiny human silhouette with arms spread wide against a bruised, violet sky.

”We should do this.”

That was it. No question mark. Just a statement of intent, lobbed into the group like a grenade.

By midnight, we had a date. By the following weekend, we had a booking. Somewhere between the excitement and the non-refundable deposit, none of us had actually Googled the elevation. Point Lenana sits at 4,985 metres above sea level. That’s nearly 5 kilometres straight up into air that has forgotten what oxygen feels like.

We found this out later. Much later.

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The Drive Up: False Confidence at Its Peak

We met at Nairobi at 5am, bleary-eyed and inexplicably cheerful. Someone had brought a Bluetooth speaker. Someone else had brought three bags for a three-day trip. The drive through the Central Highlands was the kind of beautiful that makes you forget you have knees — rolling green hills giving way to montane forest, the mountain playing coy behind its permanent collar of cloud.

We stopped at a roadside kiosk somewhere near Nanyuki and ate mandazi and drank tea from tin cups and felt, honestly, invincible. The kind of invincible that only comes before you’ve actually tried the thing.

”We’re basically athletes,” Priya said, genuinely.

Nobody disagreed.

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Day One: The Forest Lies to You

The Sirimon route starts gently. Treacherously, beautifully gently.

We walked through dense Afromontane forest — cedar and podocarpus trees draped in old man’s beard lichen, the light filtering through in long cathedral shafts. Colobus monkeys watched us from above with the particular disdain of creatures who live at altitude and have nothing to prove. The air smelled of damp earth and something green and alive.

For two hours, we talked the whole way. Caught up on each other’s lives. Told the stories we’d been saving. Laughed too loud. The path was gradual. Our spirits were high.

Then the moorland opened up.

The forest ended like a curtain being pulled back, and suddenly there was nothing between us and the sky. The vegetation dropped to waist-high tussock grass and giant groundsels — those alien, Dr. Seuss plants that look like they belong on another planet — and the trail became a conversation with gravity that we were slowly losing.

By mid-afternoon, the group had quietly split into three factions: the Fast Ones (David and Aisha, who we did not invite back), the Middle (me and Priya, negotiating), and the Philosophical Rear (Brian and Kofi, who had apparently decided the mountain was a metaphor for something and needed to work through it at their own pace).

We made Old Moses Camp by 4pm. Altitude: 3,300m. We ate ugali and beans and stew that tasted like the best meal any of us had ever eaten, and we went to bed at 8pm without argument or irony.

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Day Two: The Mountain Gets Serious

I woke at 3am with a headache that sat behind my eyes like a thumbscrew. Altitude sickness, mild. The body’s polite way of saying: you are not from here.

Half the group felt it. Kofi, mercifully, did not — and spent breakfast looking offensively healthy while the rest of us nursed our tea and tried not to move too quickly.

We climbed through the high moorland in silence that day. The landscape had become almost lunar — rust-coloured rock, frost in the shadows, the wind arriving in cold, purposeful gusts. The mountain was no longer charming. It was indifferent. That indifference, I found, was weirdly clarifying.

There’s something that happens above 4,000 metres that nobody warns you about. The noise in your head — the low-level, ever-present hum of ambition and anxiety and notifications and what am I doing with my life — it quiets. Not because the mountain gives you answers. Because it takes away the questions. You are left with the absolute simplicity of: step. breathe. step. breathe.

Priya cried a little on the trail that day. Not from pain — she told me later she didn’t fully know why. I think I understood.

We made Shipton’s Camp at 4,200m and the mountain revealed itself properly for the first time: Batian and Nelion, the twin technical peaks, sheer and dark and vertical against a sky that had gone an impossible deep blue. We stood there for a long time, not saying much.

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Day Three: Summit Morning

2am. Headtorches. The crunch of frost underfoot.

Nobody spoke on the way up to Lenana. The trail was steep and loose and the darkness made it feel endless — just the small circle of light from your torch, and the person’s boots in front of you, and your own breathing. In. Out. In. Out.

I fell behind at one point. Just for ten minutes. Long enough to look up and see the headtorches of my friends strung above me like a slow constellation moving up the mountain, and to feel — I am not embarrassed to admit this — something very close to love.

We reached Point Lenana at sunrise.

I’ll be honest: I don’t have the words for it. The sky went from black to purple to a red so saturated it felt aggressive, and then the sun came over the horizon and the whole Lewis Glacier caught fire, and the shadows fell away from the valley, and Kenya — all of it, as far as you could see — appeared below us like something being revealed for the first time.

Brian cried. Openly and without apology.

Kofi took approximately forty-seven photos.

The rest of us just stood there, freezing, grinning, shoulder to shoulder.

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What I Brought Down

Sore quads. A deep hatred of my boots. A renewed appreciation for flat ground.

But also this: the memory of six people, not particularly sporty, not particularly brave, choosing something hard together and finding out they were more than enough.

The mountain doesn’t care about your spreadsheets or your deadlines or your complicated feelings about your career trajectory. It only cares about whether you keep moving. That’s a lesson I’ve been thinking about ever since.

We’re already talking about the next one.

Someone — again, Brian — has sent a screenshot.

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If you’re thinking about Mount Kenya: do it. Take the Sirimon route up, Chogoria down. Go with people who will be honest with you about their blisters. Pack warmer than you think you need. Book a guide — ours was extraordinary. And give yourself an extra acclimatisation day. You’ll thank yourself at 4am.

Questions? Hit reply. I’ll tell you everything.

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If this landed with you, share it with someone who needs a nudge toward something difficult.

And subscribe if you want more of these — I write about travel, the outdoors, and the occasional crisis of meaning.

Kazim Ciftci is a Turkish national with a passion for travel around the world.