10 Days Mount Kilimanjaro Climb – Northern Circuit Route

Upon arrival at Kilimanjaro International Airport (JRO), you will be warmly welcomed by our representative and transferred to your hotel in Moshi. Spend the remainder of the day relaxing after your journey. In the evening, meet your experienced mountain guide for a comprehensive pre-climb briefing and equipment check to ensure you are fully prepared for your Kilimanjaro adventure.

Accommodation: Hotel in Moshi

Meal Plan: Dinner

Elevation: 2,100 m to 2,780 m

Distance: 6 km (3.7 miles)

Hiking Time: 3–4 hours

Habitat: Rainforest

After breakfast, drive to Londorossi Gate, where you will complete park registration and climbing formalities. Continue by vehicle to the Lemosho Trailhead before beginning your trek. Walk through the lush rainforest, home to black-and-white colobus monkeys, blue monkeys, and a variety of bird species. The trail gradually climbs to Mti Mkubwa (Big Tree) Camp, where your mountain crew will prepare dinner and your overnight camp.

Accommodation: Mti Mkubwa Camp

Meal Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner

The forest thins into heather and then out entirely as the trail gains the moorland. By mid-morning the sky is enormous and the heather is head-high, threaded with giant lobelia. The Shira Plateau appears ahead — a relic caldera, level and wide, swept by a cold wind that comes off the ice without announcement.

Shira 1 Camp sits at 3,500 m at the western edge of the plateau. This is the first night where altitude may make itself known. Guides check everyone's oxygen saturation before dinner — a quiet routine that continues every evening from here.

A full day on the plateau, crossing from west to east with Kibo growing ahead and the flatness of the Shira caldera around you. The route passes the Shira Cathedral — a cluster of volcanic rock towers popular with technical climbers — and the views south reach to the cloud layer sitting over the lowland farms far below.

Shira 2 Camp (3,840 m) is larger and more exposed, sitting on a slight rise with Kibo filling the eastern sky at sunset. Temperatures drop sharply after dark. Down jackets come out for dinner.

Today the route climbs to Lava Tower (4,630 m) for lunch — a deliberate push into altitude before dropping back down. The ascent threads through alpine desert, past rock hyrax colonies and the occasional clump of everlasting flowers holding their yellow heads up in the cold.

From Lava Tower the Northern Circuit diverges. Instead of dropping south to Barranco as other routes do, the trail turns north. Within an hour the landscape changes completely — fewer footprints, wider views, the mountain's quieter face. Moir Hut Camp at 4,200 m sits below the Oehler Ridge with Kenya visible in the afternoon clarity.

This is the day the Northern Circuit justifies its reputation. The trail traverses well above 4,000 m across the mountain's northern face, cutting through a landscape of dark lava, dusty scree, and outcrops where nothing grows. The silence here is structural — not the absence of sound but the presence of open space in all directions.

Third Cave Camp (3,870 m) is a slight descent and usually the warmest night since Day 2. Camp sits in a shallow depression that breaks the wind. Guides serve popcorn before dinner, which becomes a small tradition nobody questions.

The route meets the Rongai trail briefly before climbing again, passing the Second and First Caves — shallow overhangs used by early climbers as shelter, their smoke-blackened ceilings still visible. The vegetation returns in sparse tufts as the trail gains the northeastern ridge.

School Hut Camp sits at 4,750 m, close enough to the crater rim that you can see the ice fields catching afternoon light above you. Dinner is served early. Most climbers sleep — or try to — for four hours before midnight.

The alarm goes at 11 pm. Head torches on, gaiters buckled, the cold arriving immediately. Francis sets the pace — steady, unhurried, the kind of walking that feels almost slow until you feel your lungs and realise it is not slow at all. The scree gives way to firmer ground near Gillman's Point (5,681 m), where the crater rim catches the first grey light of pre-dawn.

From Gillman's Point to Uhuru Peak is another hour along the rim, past the Rebmann Glacier and the Furtwangler ice remnant. At 5,895 m the summit sign is there, and so is the view — a curvature in the horizon, a shadow cast by the mountain onto the cloud layer thousands of metres below, Kenya and Tanzania both present and unaware of each other.

Descent to Horombo Hut (3,720 m) on the Marangu Route takes four to five hours on tired legs. Hot food and beds with mattresses wait at Horombo.

The final descent passes through moorland and then back into the dense montane forest — the air thickening, smelling of earth and wet leaves, each breath arriving with a new ease that feels almost indulgent after days at altitude. The Marangu Gate at 1,830 m is reached by midday.

Certificates are issued in a small ceremony at the gate: the standard summit certificate for Uhuru Peak, signed by Francis. Transport back to Moshi takes about an hour. The hotel has arranged a celebration dinner.