Mark Eddy is a former environment writer for The Denver Post and current principal at Mark Eddy Communications, a Denver-based consulting firm specializing in strategic communications. In his spare time, he travels, hikes, and bikes with his wife, Diane, and dog, Charley—and tends his bees. He can be reached at wmmarkeddy@gmail.com.

Excerpt:

The story jolted us. It was a wake-up call we couldn’t ignore. It was late
2005, and my wife and I had just read that some scientists were predicting
the glaciers on Kilimanjaro could be gone in as little as fifteen or twenty
years. Doing some online research, we found many similar stories, including
several that said the glaciers had lost 82 percent of their mass since 1912 and
the mountain could be ice free by 2020.

We’d always talked about hiking to the top of Kili—it was on that jumbled
list of travel adventures we keep in our heads—but somehow other
trips kept pushing it back to next year, and then the next, and the next.
It wasn’t as if my wife and I were living in a cave. We knew climate change
was happening and that it would have devastating impacts. But we, like a lot
of people, thought it was happening relatively slowly. We tend to think of
major Earth changes in terms of lifetimes and not years. And at the time, the
estimates of how fast the changes were happening were much more conservative
than they are today. These changes, we thought at the time, wouldn’t have
dramatic impacts for quite a while. We had time to see the glaciers.

But this news was transformational for us. If the glaciers Hemingway
made famous were really going to be gone in less than two decades, that
meant they were getting smaller all the time. We needed to make climbing
Kili a priority instead of something we just talked about.

We researched outfitters that fall and winter, and in early 2006 booked
a climb for that September. Through the spring and summer, we hiked Colorado’s
fourteeners to get our legs and lungs in shape. On September 1, we
took off for Tanzania.

…On Kili, you walk slowly, very slowly. In fact, until you do it, you
wouldn’t think you could walk that slowly for five and a half days (the day
and a half downhill is taken at a sometimes-breakneck pace). So on the way
up, there’s a lot of time to think and talk. I wondered about not only the
glaciers, but everything that depended on them. What would happen to the
rain forest we’d walked through and the white colobus monkeys, giant ferns,
and massive trees that lived there? How would they survive without the
water from snow- and glacier melt? How would the farmers who depended
on the corn they grew on the flanks of the big mountain to feed their families
fare if the crops withered when the glaciers were gone? Would the entire
area turn into a moonscape covered with volcanic dust and populated with
drought-resistant plants like the upper slopes of the mountain?