First came the cracking noise, then a bit of dust from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Paul Cunha’s ”magnificent morning” on Africa’s highest peak was over.
”We started hearing some yelling,” he recalled.
Cunha looked up.
”You could see some rocks starting to fall,” the 45-year-old said on Sunday from his bed at Massachusetts General Hospital. ”People were yelling ‘rock, run, watch out!”’
Boulders bouncing every 30m were headed toward Cunha’s group, which included his wife, Carol, who dove to the right and escaped injury.
”My eyes caught one in particular that appeared to have my name on it,” he said.
”I guess I didn’t move fast enough or I moved enough so it just glanced off my left shoulder and pummeled me down a hill.”
Doctors on Monday will operate to insert screws and plates to hold Cunha’s left shoulder in place.
Three other American hikers were killed during the rock slide on Wednesday. Cunha knew two of the dead, and said they were hiking ahead of him when the rock slide started.
Of the world’s top peaks, Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, is considered among the easiest to scale. The climbers set out Saturday on the Umbwe route, the most difficult on the mountain, which at 5 802m is the highest freestanding mountain in the world. Even so, the route is only a very difficult hike, not requiring safety ropes or special equipment.
Cunha, who has worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club for 25 years, estimated his group was about 5 250m up when the rock slide occurred. He described the rock that hit him as being the size of a 133 litre rubbish bin.
Knocked unconscious in the tumble, he awoke to porters examining his shoulder, which was bleeding. The top portion of his humerus has been shattered, he said.
”I don’t believe I ever looked up after that point,” he said.
Tour guides walked him and his wife down the mountain for the start of what turned into a day-long journey to a Nairobi hospital.
He arrived in Boston on Friday night.
Cunha hopes to be home in Jefferson, New Hampshire, by the end of the week.
More than 20 000 tourists attempt to climb the mountain every year. About 10 people die each year during the climb, usually from high altitude sickness.
But rock slides are rare, officials in Tanzania said. They said there had been a change in the weather at the peak before the rock fall which may have contributed to the accident.
Warmer temperatures over the past decade have melted some of Mount Kilimanjaro’s glaciers, causing them to retreat, which has loosened rocks once held in place by the ice.
”It was a magnificent morning,” Cunha said. ”It was a wonderful place to be until the rocks started sliding.” – Sapa-AP