Over the summer, students and faculty of Ponte Vedra High School travel the country and world. The Sub-Saharan country of Tanzania is known for treasured national parks and game reserves, but most notably having the world\u2019s highest free-standing mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro. Peaking at 19,340 feet, Mt. Kilimanjaro allures around 35,000 thrill seekers a year attempting to summit the arduous pinnacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This past summer, Martin Hillier, PVHS\u2019s AP Physics teacher, went on a vacation to Tanzania with his sister and attempted the impressive feat of ascending Mt. Kilimanjaro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Hiller\u2019s pre-hike preparation consisted of running \u201cbetween four to five miles, four to five days per week, for a few months.\u201d Summiting such a mountain can seem daunting, especially since Mr. Hillier\u2019s highest hike he\u2019d ever done before Kilimanjaro was in North Carolina, which according to him was \u201cnot high at all.\u201d Mr. Hillier stated that hiking Kilimanjaro \u201cwas never a thing I\u2019d think to do, but my sister was going to go and I didn\u2019t want her to go by herself.\u201d He did concede and say that he \u201cgot pretty excited about it\u201d leading up to the adventure, believing it would be a \u201conce in a lifetime opportunity that I wouldn\u2019t have done otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The total hike was seven days, five days up and two days down. Mr. Hiller explained that the \u201cfirst couple days were pretty easy, but the third day was the hardest day\u201d climbing up the mountain. He believes this because his group \u201chad to go up the side of a wall\u2026 which was a little bit tricky to do.\u201d \u201cThat was the hardest day other than the last day, which I think we went 5000 feet in about eight hours and we started at midnight so you weren\u2019t exposed to the sun the whole time.\u201d Mr. Hiller emphasized how descending from the summit is \u201cactually harder than you think because you\u2019re so tired from the eight hours going up and going down is actually more dangerous because if you fall, you tumble.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Hillier conveyed that he is not planning to do any similar excursions in the future, stating \u201cI would never do anything more dangerous like Mt. Everest, that is life or death stuff that takes a lifetime of training.\u201d He did say that he enjoyed his hike up Kilimanjaro and remembers most fondly the guides he met along the trip. The guides, known as Porters, \u201cdon\u2019t make a lot of money, but they make their living going up and down that mountain. They could do it [summit] two to three times a month and they would run by you with your luggage on their heads,\u201d describes Mr. Hillier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Nate Wicker Over the summer, students and faculty of Ponte Vedra High School travel the country and world. The Sub-Saharan country of Tanzania is known for treasured national parks and game reserves, but most notably having the world\u2019s highest…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6443,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_meta":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/Screenshot-2023-11-15-at-9.32.17-AM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6439"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6444,"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6439\/revisions\/6444"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pvhstiburon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}