"A frigid wind sliced across my cheeks as I tightened the drawstrings of my parka. A sliver of moon hung above a sweep of cloud so far below us that it felt as if we were looking down from space. My dad trudged a few paces ahead, his breath visible in the cold. We were on the final stretch to the summit and feeling every bit of the more than 19,000 feet we'd climbed."
"Ascending Kilimanjaro is like hiking through an entire continent's worth of ecosystems. We started in the cultivation zone, winding past villages where crops thrived in rich volcanic soil, then entered lush, humid rainforest alive with birdsong. Higher up, the landscape shifted to moorland, with giant heather shrubs rising like sculptures against an endless sky. In camp, my dad and I would sit shoulder to shoulder as our steadfast porters ladled out steaming bowls of hearty soup."
"The trip was born out of a simple idea of my dad's: When each of his kids turned 16, we could choose anywhere around the globe to go, just the two of us. It was his way of giving us the world, or at least opening the door to it. He'd spent his own childhood in a humble lakeside port town in Michigan, where summer meant swimming in Lake Huron and playing tennis on cracked public courts."
A sixteen-year-old daughter and her father climbed Mount Kilimanjaro together, confronting cold, altitude and blisters during a midnight summit push above 19,000 feet. The route traversed cultivation zones, rainforest, and moorland, revealing diverse ecosystems. Camp life included shared meals with steadfast porters and cultural exchange, such as swapping music from a single Walkman headphone for porters' mountain stories. Nights were spent in a tiny tent listening to wind across the slope. The trip originated from the father's promise to take each child anywhere at 16. The father grew up in a humble Michigan lakeside town, summers at Lake Huron and tennis on cracked public courts, with family road-trip vacations to Florida.
Read at Conde Nast Traveler
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