Summit night finally came! We all probably got a total of 3 hours of sleep. The guides woke us up at 10:15pm to do a briefing and eat a snack before we started our trek to the summit. For summit night all 4 guides accompanied us plus 5 summit porters. The guides select 5 strong porters to come to the summit with us so there is one person for each hiker for our safety. As a team we started at 11:15pm to hike to the summit of Kili to make it for sunrise. At about 16,000 feet Team Araka and Team Poley Poley split up. So my Dutch friends and I went ahead. Let me tell you that air becomes thin! You get into a breathing rhythm and one step faster or one incline more and your heart starts beating faster and your breath becomes shorter. Anytime that happened I just told myself to breath in through my nose and out through my mouth. The higher we got the more breaks we took to regulate our breathing. At about 18,000 feet the sun started to rise and showed gorgeous views of the clouds and the land scape. It literally looked like we were walking in space with all the lava rock around us. It took about 7 hours for us to summit the first peak on Kilimanjaro which is Stella point. The wave of emotion you feel when you reach that first summit is indescribable. It was so easy to give up but we did not. We stayed strong, listened to our bodies and kept our minds positive. Then we made the hour trek over to Uhuru Peak which is the highest peak of Kilimanjaro standing at 19,341 feet. Reaching that point at about 8:15am. What a dream and THE MOST challenging experience physically and mentally I have experienced. High altitude is real and we saw some people who were not doing well in the altitude. Our team persevered and were so grateful for our guides and porters who kept a close eye on each of us!!