ASC adventurer, Grant Mooney, recently summited Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, and collected animal observations for UMass Amherst Senior Research Fellow, Doug Hardy.  Dr. Hardy, a specialist in climate and glaciers, is looking for evidence of mammals and birds at high elevations (above 13,000 ft) of Kilimanjaro.  He plans to use radiocarbon dating on frozen remains of animals in order to more accurately estimate the age of Kilimanjaro’s ice.

As Mooney ascended the 19,341-foot Tanzanian mountain, he used his GPS to mark the altitude and coordinates of the animals he spotted.  He observed 15 to 20 birds and small rodents at high altitudes, including a mouse at the 17,000-foot mark.  Most of the animals Mooney saw were scavengers, such as white napped ravens, which he assumed traveled to high elevations to feed on the scraps left behind by climbers.

We kicked off our time here in Peru with a high-altitude punch of three gargantuan passes over a five-day circuit around the powerful Ausangate peak. On the third day as we embarked up the circuit's daunting Palomani Pass (peaking at over 17,000 feet), we exclaimed the proverb aloud as if to say, "we will make it over this darn pass!" Almost simultaneously, we were overcome with a serendipitous feeling of being so fortunate to experience the pass on that day. As we looked ahead to the multiple false peaks of the pass, we sensed the hanging glacier falling over the black cliffs to our left, the soft lines of the dune-like mountains to our right... and when we stopped to catch our breath, control our heartbeat, or regain our balance, we'd peer backward at a lone red mountain with another mountain's sharp black spires peaking out from behind it. In this sense, the proverb evolved to, "always remember feeling this alive".