At the end of a very successful 2009 MEM Africa Northern Circuit/Western Breach/Crater Camp climb a few sobering points came to light.
The ugly fact of widespread litter and human refuse on Kilimanjaro, and particularly in the campsites, is probably inevitable thanks to the volume of people visiting the mountain annually, and perhaps even more so thanks to the sheer number of support crew involved.
However the situation at Crater Camp, one of the last frontiers of isolation on Kilimanjaro, was by any standards appalling.
Crater Camp
Crater Camp sits atop the legendary Western Breach and some 600ft below the summit. It is squeezed between the crater wall and the diminishing Furtwangler Glacier that sits like a giant ice-cube on the sandy floor of the Kibo Crater. It is a hostile and moon-like landscape, reasonably warm under direct sunlight, but virtually airless and bitterly cold the moment that the sun sinks below the line of the crater.
