After Everest, Toolika Rani conquers Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro
Mountaineer Toolika Rani of Lucknow has achieved another outstanding feat of her mountaineering career. This week, she conquered Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Tanzania, Africa.
Mountaineer Toolika Rani of Lucknow has achieved another outstanding feat of her mountaineering career. This week, she conquered Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Tanzania, Africa.
Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest free standing mountain of the world and is not a part of any mountain range. It is one of the seven summits and the highest summit of the seven continents.
The retired class one officer of Indian Air Force, Toolika scaled the summit between February 17 and 22. She deliberately did it in 6 days instead of 7-8 days.
“Since I had trekked to Mt Annapur na Base Camp in January 2016 itself, I thought my body was acclimatized and I also wanted to check my fitness level and make the climb more challenging.”
Toolika willingly took the most challenging Machame route. “Its exclusivity was that it was a steep route with rocks and boulders. The advantage is a lot of height gain in short duration and the disadvantage is that the body does not get enough time for acclimatization,” she told HT.
The biggest challenge was that the climb was very steep, with rock walls and boulders, high winds and cold temperature, up to minus 15-20 degrees Celsius.
She reached the summit on fifth day. This time too she climbed alone with her guide. Generally people go in a group. She said, “We had a porter and a cook to carry tents, food and water. At places there is no water source and people have to carry water from the previous source itself.” As she marched on she saw many climbers aborting the climb and coming down.
Nearly four years after becoming the first woman from UP to scale Mount Everest, Toolika has already conquered a number of other summits in recent times.
Toolika Rani succeeded in conquering Mt Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal in January this year.
Credited with an illustrious trekking career, she became the only Indian woman to climb the highest volcano of Asia, the 5,671-metre high Mt Damavand located in the Alborz mountain range of Iran in 2015.