Our 17 year old daughter,  Rachel,  is returning home from her trip – Kilimanjaro 2012: climbing poverty mountain. In a series of blogs we shared why we pushed aside our natural parental tendencies of protection to let her climb Africa’s highest mountain. More in this mini-series here.

She made it!

After walking uphill in snow through the night, the 5 strong team made it to Gilman’s Point (the crater rim) by around 9am local time last Thursday. Leaving the rest of the team to recover, Rachel went on to Uhuru Peak, the mountain’s highest point, reaching it by around 11am that morning. We’ll always remember where we were when her text came through. You can read the updates from the team here.

Only 40% of people attempting to reach the summit actually make it so needless to say we are tremendously proud of her. Her text from the summit asked how much she had raised.  Magnificently that total is now over £5,000 and still rising. Thank you to everyone for your amazing generosity.

This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uhuru_Peak_Mt._Kilimanjaro_1.JPG under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.