Very few children have celebrated their birthday atop Mount Kilimanjaro and maybe no other seven year-olds at all.
But that’s exactly what Autumn Sarah Lott from Gold River did on Thursday.
“It was hard hiking to the summit but it was really cool from the top,” she told CHEK News via Zoom from a tent she was sharing with her mom in the Serengeti region Sunday.
Mount Kilimanjaro is a long way from Vancouver Island, 14,500 km from Gold River to be exact.
The mountain is a dormant volcano in United Republic of Tanzania and stands 5,895 metres above sea level and about 4,900 metres above its plateau base.
“We had to wake up at midnight and then we started hiking at 1 in the morning so we had to hike in the dark by headlamps so that was a bit tough and I think it took us about 6.5 hours to get to the summit,” said Autumns’ mom Francesca.
In total it was a seven-day trek preparing for the final summit day.
Francesca Lott has literally been planning this trip she says since she was pregnant with Autumn.
“She’s definitely the youngest Canadian for sure. It’s kind of hard to find information online but from what I’ve seen I think she’s the second youngest girl in the world to summit and then the third youngest kid overall in the world to summit,” said Francesca Lott.
The local government limits the minimum age to 10 years old to climb Kilimanjaro so Francesca had to prove that Autumn had completed many other hard hikes and climbs, including some around Strathcona Park.
“We didn’t really want to do it for record-setting or anything like that we just wanted to do it because it was an amazing experience,” she said.
Autumn told CHEK News she enjoyed the climb but that “it was very cold at the top.”
Kilimanjaro is one of what’s called the Seven Summits and they say they plan to conquer them all in the future.
Dean Stoltz
