- Date: June 15, 2017
- Karanga Camp To Kosovo Camp
- Elevation: 13066ft to 15750ft (2684ft gain)
- Distance: 2.30 miles
- Hiking Time: 5 hours
- Vegetation Zone: Alpine Desert
We woke up at 6:30am with hot beverage-in-tent service by our server, Peter. Lodrick instructed us to get ready for an early start for our ~4.5 hour hike to Barafu camp, which is the main base camp. From Barafu, we planned on walking up the hill for an extra hour to the Kosovo camp. Kosovo is small campsite about 600 ft higher on the rocky hill from Barafu. This campsite has limited availability for permits. There are no toilet facilities at Kosovo, so you would need to have your own portable toilet per certain number of people to be able to camp there. Based on the number of chemical toilets we had for our group, we were limited to 17 of us to camp at Kosovo. Our group of 17 that would camp at Kosovo included nine of us, 4 guides and 4 summit porters. The rest of the crew members were to climb down to Barafu after setting everything up for us and also to climb back up next day to pack up. The goal was to make that steep rocky ascent today during the day time, to save an hour and also energy for early morning summit push.
We started walking at 8am. After hiking up and down a few hills for four and a half hours, we reached Barafu Camp. After signing-in, we continued our uphill journey to our basecamp, Kosovo. Our porters had our tents and lunch ready for us. We ate at 2:30pm as soon as the entire group made it there. It was a really windy and cold afternoon at Kosovo. The plan was to take a nap, wake up and eat dinner at 8, sleep for another hour or two, wake up at 11pm, have breakfast, and start climbing at midnight. But since we ate our lunch so late, none of us were in the mood for dinner. We asked Rick if we could skip 8pm dinner, wake up at 11pm and eat late dinner. We could catch a little more sleep that way. Lodrick preferred that we ate two meals- dinner and breakfast before the the strenuous climb to the summit but he finally gave in and agreed. We hung out and chatted for another hour or so before going to sleep at 5pm.
Wind picked up later in the afternoon and it got really stormy with light snow. I tried real hard to close my eyes and meditate in efforts to get some sleep, but anxiousness about the summit push and the loud sounds of the storm outside kept me awake for most of the night.
Show me the Trail 
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