Day six. The climb to Barafu Camp. The final camp before summit night. The point at which the mountain stops being beautiful and starts being serious.

I want to be careful about how I frame this because I am not a therapist and the mountain is not a cure. What I can tell you is that Kilimanjaro did something for my mental health that twenty years of managing depression with medication and therapy had not managed to do. And there is science behind why that might be true.

Every year, tens of thousands of climbers summit Kilimanjaro. The porters who made it possible carry the next group up the mountain. This blog is about them.