Most Mt. Kilimanjaro climbers plan for up to a week of trekking to summit Africa’s tallest peak. On Oct. 6, Kelly Halpin took off at 5 a.m. and reached the top by noon.
With a round-trip time of 10 hours and 30 minutes, the Jackson Hole-born-and-raised runner set a new route record on the 19,341-foot peak without support.
Until this week, Halpin said there had been no recorded time for women racing up the mountain’s shortest, steepest way up, known as the Umbwe route.
“There’s definitely some altitude involved in that,” she said on a call with KHOL. “Honestly, it was really fun to be a little lightheaded up there. It made me feel very euphoric.”
A few weeks earlier, Colorado runner Erin Ton bested the previous record up the Mweka route, another popular trail up the peak.
The best part for Halpin wasn’t setting the baseline time. It was learning the mountain, and its five ecosystems, with a local runner friend, Simon Mtuy.
One of Tanzania’s foremost trail runners, Mtuy had long encouraged Halpin to come race in his backyard where he held the previous men’s record.
Mtuy’s protégé, Spanish runner Killian Jornet, would beat him years later after training under him. The pair spent nine months planning and a week acclimatizing on the mountain ahead of the record attempt. Just twelve days before Halpin secured the record, the two snatched the fastest time for a mixed gender ascent on the country’s next highest mountain, Mt. Meru.
“It’s just a really incredible way to get to know a mountain,” Halpin said. “Through a true, true local whose ancestors are from the base of the mountain.”
That far outweighed racing herself on one of the “seven summits,” a list of the tallest peaks on each continent.
