(Photo provided) Three members of the Donnell family successfully scaled Mt. Kilimanjaro earlier this year. Pictured are sisters Ashley (Donnell) Koontz, Kristen (Donnell) Tschiniak, and their father Steve Donnell. All three of them are Perry Meridian High School alumni.
BY HANNAH GUNNELL
One southside family has successfully crossed climbing a mountain off their bucket list.
Three of the Donnell family members reached the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in January.
“My sister turned 40 this year, and she’s always wanted to climb it so it was her 40th birthday goal,” Kristen (Donnell) Tschiniak said. Her sister’s name is Ashley (Donnell) Koontz. “So about a year and a half ago we started planning — and I invited myself along on the trip which she was fine with — and then we convinced our dad to go so we had a father daughter trip which was awesome.”
Tschiniak, Koontz and Steve Donnell trained for nine months to climb the mountain. Training included running, cardio, stair climbing, and strength workouts. Tschiniak is a travel agent, so she handled all the flight arrangements. The family completed the climb with Climb Kili, a climbing and safari tours company, and there were three other tourists from the United States who completed the climb with them.
“You have to go with a climbing company on Kilimanjaro, it’s law there, so we picked one that had awesome reviews and they do everything else for you so you only have to do the climb,” Tschiniak siad. “They have porters who carry the bags, the tents, the table and chairs, and then we had three climbing guides who make all your food for you — and the food was incredible for being on the side of a mountain.”
The Perry Meridian alums’ route started off in a rainforest zone, then through an area where all the trees looked like “Dr. Seuss trees,” as Tschiniak put it.
“Then you keep climbing up up up, then the night before summit night you’re in the arctic zone,” she said. “Climbing kilimanjaro isn’t hard, fit people can do it, but the altitude sickness is what gets you. It’s one of seven summits in the world. The elevation is pretty intense toward the end.”
In fact, members of the Donnell family did get sick, she said. But they were able to push through and recover. The climbing company has the tourists climb very slowly over a two-week period to help with climatizing to the altitude and preventing sickness. In fact, the guides kept saying, “Pole, pole!” which is Swahili for “slowly, slowly.” (They learned quite a bit of Swahili during the climb.)
“Altogether we were gone for 10 days,” Tschiniak said. “I got sick from some type of pneumonia thing but I took antibiotics from the travel doctor and was able to make it. My dad got altitude sickness too, but we made it to the top.”
The day of the climb to the summit was rough, she said.
“You get to base camp around afternoon, then you go to sleep right after you eat dinner, then they wake you up at midnight and you put on every layer of clothing you brought, then you start climbing the steepest and coldest part and it takes 6-7 hours to climb the summit, so you get to the top as the sun is rising,” she said. “Then you can’t spend much time at the top other than getting pictures because the altitude will make you sick. We were up there for maybe 10 minutes. Then you begin the grueling descent back down. It was awesome.”
Tschiniak said the view from the top was beautiful. Mt. Kilimanjaro is a free standing mountain, as opposed to being in a mountain range, so her family had a gorgeous view of everything down below for the whole trip.
“One night our camp was close to the top and you could look down and see the city lights down below,” she said. “The sweeping views over Tanzania were beautiful.”
When they returned, the Donnell family went on a safari through the Ngorogoro Crater.
The next thing on Tschiniak’s bucket list is to visit Egypt. She has two young boys she’d like to take with her, so plans to wait until they’re older.
“Our very far off next dream would be to hike to base camp of Everyest when our kids are old enough, and we’d bring our families along,” she said.
