Our off-road skate adventure to the rooftop of Africa began inauspiciously enough on a layover in Amsterdam. While wearing inline skates I had just pedaled out to the airport on a chopped-out Dutch bicycle and surrendered it to my Mount Kilimanjaro skate expedition partner Dave Cooper. We were ferrying his luggage through the woods and back to my grandmother's house in the pouring rain.

"For the record I just want you to know that this is the stupidest thing we've ever done,"Cooper said, not referring to the biking and skating we were just then doing.

"Speak for yourself, buddy,"I shot back, a little surprised by my own tone of conviction. "Nothing of significance has ever been accomplished without stupidity."

You may consider me out of my cotton-pickin' mind for wanting to skate up and down a 19,340 foot tall mountain in deep, dark Africa, but look at it for a second from my perspective: I've spent so much of the last ten years in skates that I'm more likely to hurt myself with shoes on. Why, then, should I risk injury and dare to be different without skates?

"What's the motivation here?"Cooper and others would frequently ask. "Are you really going to do the whole thing on skates?"No one could believe that I wanted to go up Kilimanjaro on inlines for the view alone. In fact, it was difficult convincing people that this was neither a publicity stunt nor a Guinness Book of World Records attempt.

The simple need to skate Kilimanjaro began on a peak in my Berkeley backyard in 1990. Baseline for all map surveys of the western United States, Mount Diablo is merely 3,849 feet tall, but since it's an isolated peak, more square mileage is visible from the top of Diablo than from any other mountain in the world except Kilimanjaro. This fact never escaped me.

In 1990 I frequently skated up Diablo illegally, sneaking past the rangers and frying myself in the anaerobic skillet of a vertical world before sitting on the summit like a pooped-out marmot contentedly surveying his territory. In my mind's eye I'd multiply Diablo's elevation by five, divide the amount of oxygen by half, subtract the paved road, add some tropical savannah, and I'd get an idea how breathtaking the view could really be.

January normally offers the best chances for reaching the summit in clear weather, but when we touched down three degrees south of the equator in Nairobi, Kenya, on January 8, 1998, the sky was falling and no mountain was visible. Tourism was literally stuck in the mud, because impassable roads meant all the major safari parks were closed down, and hordes heading instead for the beaches in Dar Es Salaam were only met with more rain. El Nino was the big buzzword on the street, accountable for the wettest dry season of the century.

At least the landscape giving thanks by bursting forth. Our bus to Kilimanjaro's base in Moshi, Tanzania, took us through the kind of classic savannah I thought only existed in National Geographic. Even with hanging clouds it was an expansive landscape, ornamented by flat-topped acacia trees and Tower of Babel termite mounds. This scenery wasn't the gold of memory, only green beyond belief.

Along the national highway, really just a lonely road cutting a swath through the boondocks, spear-carrying Masai men wrapped in red cloth grazed their cattle, pacelines of colorfully dressed women walked with heads hidden under giant bushels of cooking wood, little girls emulated their elders with barely filled buckets of water, and little boys rode rickety wooden scooters with old tire rubber nailed to the wheels.

We took our specially engineered off-road skates out for a test ride the day before hitting the mountain. The four-inch diameter knobby polyurethane tires had no problem grabbing real African dirt, and judging by the ecstatically playful response we got from of the natives ñ tag seems to be it -- off-road skating is set to take off in Tanzania. No word for skates exists in Swahili, so when someone dubbed our off-road inlines "flying shoes,"the name sort of stuck.

The shoes hardly flew up the mountain, however. First we had to smuggle them around the corner from Marangu Gate (5995 ft), because the rangers there are notorious for routinely confiscating snowboards, skis, and mountain bikes. Once we got rolling, though, only about two percent of the three thousand feet in 5 miles to Mandara huts (9,200 feet) was actually skateable. In the forest, old man's beard dripped from trees whose claws held back the earth in terraces. Skating this was a bit like duck-walking up a giant staircase and coasting the landings. No handrails for aggressive skaters to slide on here, just roots.

When rain became a constant companion beginning at about 10,500 feet on day two, we had just emerged out of lush tropical rainforest and into what looked like Scottish moorlands. Trekkers were slipping and sliding all over the place in the black mud, but our skates held firm. Thanks to duct tape covering the ventilation holes in the outer molded plastic shell, my feet were kept toasty dry until one real soaker of a stream crossing.

We had an extra day for drying out and acclimatization at Horombo huts (12,500 feet) on day three. Cooper and I wandered around camp wrapped in wool blankets like tribes people and came to be called "Masai"by all the porters and guides. We hung our clothes to dry in one of their smoky cook shacks and watched the grueling work of making ugali, a traditional stiff porridge from corn meal and water. One guy sweated just holding the pot down while another muscular dude used a giant wooden spoon to alternately fluff it up and pat it down.

Occasionally a porter would enter the shack slanted like the rain and shiver violently next to the fire, steam slowly rising from wrung-out clothes. These guys were the real story of the trip, balancing heavy loads on their heads for long hours in inclement weather over terrible terrain at altitude, and on nothing more in their bellies than stiff porridge. In our six days on the mountain, I saw porters under imponderable weight, women included, prancing antelope-like in flip flops, blown-out shoes, or bare feet altogether.

Arriving porters were grapevines of information. One arrived in advance of an our dunny paper sponsor, an Australian on the five day trek who had to come back from Kibo because of headaches, nausea, and discharging eyes. Another juicy story was how just two days previously, a 53 year-old American doctor had died after being rushed back down to Moshi with altitude sickness. Word was that he had died in the hospital and his body got dumped back at the hotel because his eager friends -- some friends they turned out to be -- had turned right around and gone back up the mountain. Wheelbarrow stretchers parked outside the cook shack served as a grim reminder of the mountain's power to take away.

When not carrying on with porters and guides, Cooper's and my natural function was to boost sagging morale amongst trekkers. Basically, people had come for walk in the park and instead were confronted with the hardest thing they'd ever done in their lives. "I came here for a vacation,"the line went, "so why am I doing this to myself?'"Our method of commiserating involved laughing to keep from crying. Cooper confessed that the more miserable he became the happier he got, a funny, inverse sort of relationship that was difficult to explain but so true. I'd pipe out a baleful tune on my shakuhachi flute, perhaps the one who about the bear who climbed another mountain to see what he could see.

The peak was still hiding behind mountains of clouds when we set out from Horombo on the fourth day. The saddle between the twin peaks of Mawensi and Uhuru was on the menu, ten kilometers of high alpine desert we'd patiently been waiting for since day one. First, though, we had to negotiate a tricky section through a washed-out meadow, balancing atop tufts of grass to get across the epic flooding. By 11 a.m., just as we were breaking out onto the saddle and eagerly skating again, we came across the first sullen trekkers who had set out for the summit at 1 a.m. that morning. All had been denied, but one father was beaming because his teenage daughter had left him behind and gone for it all.

Steady rain turned to stinging hail at thirteen and a half thousand feet and driving snow by fourteen and a half thousand. If we were too wet and cold to celebrate the fact that then and there we were higher than any place in the continental U.S., how fun was it going to be, then, at nineteen thousand and change?

For walkers, the footing was getting surly fast. Snow covered talus and scree gave way easily underfoot, leaving big slide marks in the snow. But our skates dug in solidly like crampons, offering traction aplenty.

"Felix, are we going to make it to the top?"I asked our guide with the video camera going. There was a pregnant pause as one eyebrow lifted slightly, but he kept the faith. "I think so, but we must go slowly,"he said, and then added ominously, " after tonight the snow is so deep no one will reach Gilman's " Gilman's Point is on the crater rim. The real top is another six hundred feet up.

Crossover steps were practical when negotiating steep slopes or boulder fields. To my delight, the guides had evolved a parallel method of climbing, side-stepping uphill like skaters, only these guys were in shape. They'd bound up the slope, stop for a brief interval to puff on a "Sportsmanîcigarette, and then go shooting by again while we plodded inexorably on.

We reached Kibo hut at 3 p.m. The teenager daughter who had dropped her dad was just back from Freedom Peak and was wretching her guts out next to some solar panels that hadn't taken a charge in two months. Through uncontrollable sobs Annalies blurted out that it had been the worst day of her life. Upon seeing our skates, though, she rallied considerably, and after a round of hugs was ready to continue on down the mountain. No one present could deny that in a sappy but real way, Annalies had undergone a true rite of passage, coming up the mountain a girl and returning a woman.

In waning light Cooper burst out screaming "The peak! The peak!îFor the first time the whole trip we could finally see the top, clear as a bell, and it was more than impressive. "Can't say we climbed it and didn't see it!"Cooper pronounced triumphantly. "Now it's ësaw it and didn't climb it,'"a young American doctor also named Dave retorted snidely.

At 1 a.m. Cooper and I were ready for the final assault. We skated out of the dank hut and into the light of a hazy moon. Felix led the way. Bobbing pinpricks of light from guides up ahead resolved into lanterns as we drew near. After two and a half hours of picking our way up and over fuzzy forms in steadily falling snow, we took a short breather in a cave. Felix pointed out lights from Olduvai Gorge which were visible through gathering clouds to the northeast. How many times had our prehistoric ancestors gazed up at Kilimanjaro's glowing white mantle? How many knew what was up with all this snow?

Progress was slow but steady as the snow got deeper and the slope steadily more severe. We reeled in the four American doctors and their two guides by the base of the Wall, a brutally steep talus slope with forty-four switchbacks up to the crater rim. Together we plowed a course straight up, our only option since the trail was hopelessly hidden under two and a half feet of snow.

I led out the pack single file and took a long pull just fast enough to keep me warm (if I exerted myself too heavily, I noticed my hands would start to freeze and only backing off the pace a bit thawed them out again). I got a good rhythm going, planting two poles in front of me and then stepping up herringbone fashion through the snow, one skate at a time. Sometimes you really had to punch out a foothold before committing all your weight to one leg.

"You almost dropped me back there, buddy,"Cooper managed in a hoarse voice up on Gilman's Point. It was just after six a.m. and snow was traveling horizontally. "You should have told me, I'd have waited up"I said, to which he replied "Couldn't."With great effort the doctors dragged out a camera and I snapped their picture. There was no time for loitering here. Only one of the doctors decided to go on.

Normally it's another hour and a half from Gilman's Point up to the true summit, consisting of a short drop into the crater and then a tiring but straightforward final trudge up to Uhuru (Freedom) Peak. The snow was too deep in the crater for this route, so we were forced to opt for a longer walk around the rim and then up to the top, an additional forty five minutes each way. We were looking at another five hours minimum before returning back to Gilman's Point, which was still eight hours from where we'd spend the night..

Trusty Felix did the hard work now of poking through waist-deep snow in places, providing us a template for our own steps. Near the top, visibility was steadily worsening. Menacing jaws of icicles as wide as football fields faded in and out of sight through pancake-sized snowflakes. Dave was hallucinating and needed to be coaxed down the homestretch.

At the top there was no view to be had, only a howling whiteout. It felt as if we had just swum under a pool cover into the deep end, and now that our chests were heaving it was time to turn around and come back up for air. Cooper was withdrawn, using all his strength to stay standing. While planting sponsor flags as if we had just landed on the moon, I asked Dave, the American doctor, why he had wanted to bag Freedom Peak. He said he was inspired by Michael Crichton's book Travels. "Didn't he have a rotten time?"I said, remembering having read that section of the book with the perverse interest of a disaster tourist. "Yeah, but he learned a lot about himself,"was his reply.

12 hours after starting out from Kibo we were back, with another 4 hours yet to Horombo huts where we'd sleep. Dave was wrapped around a rock in exhaustion while I was being attacked by snap-happy tourists. A frantic man who never even noticed the skates interrogated me about weather conditions in the crater. He was one from the party that had just lost one to the mountain. He needed to get pictures of the ice fields for a climbing magazine.

Skating the saddle was a head rush, the world's longest downhill bunny run. The skates' wheels sank into the substrate just far enough to provide some braking action and prevent a runaway. For once we were waiting on Felix and had time to appreciate the surreal surroundings of the high desert.

"Wasn't that the hardest thing you've ever done, buddy?"Coopie asked in earnest over a beer that night at Horombo huts. I was already thinking about the marathon guides do, up from the gate and back down within 24 hours. Felix had told me about it and it sounded like a reasonable challenge.

Another guide named Ellis approached us and told us some of the bizarre ways people had conquered Kilimanjaro in the past. One wacked-out guy had walked up backwards and down forwards, without ever turning around. Another had flown his hang glider from the summit down to Moshi in 45 minutes. Still others had parachuted into the crater and run to the bottom. To Ellis' mind, though, we took the cake. "What you did was more than funny,"he told us.

Cooper hoofed it down the mountain the last day because of a broken big toe. His sense of humor wasn't affected, however, as he assumed the role of a Masai porter. Wrapped in his wool blanket, he balanced his pack atop his head and slipped and slid his way down, proving my earlier point about it being safer on skates than on shoes. I had fun of my own, screaming down the twisty single track of the high meadows. Startled tourists and porters scattered from the trail like frogs.

To lend a sense of completion to the journey and to preserve the chance of doing it again, I smuggled those flying shoes right back out of the park. I had gone up Kilimanjaro for the world's best view and instead looked through myself and saw the unlimited potential for off-road adventure travel. Even though the physical imprints made by those skates were purely transitory, the marks they made in my memory will forever remain.



Post script facts:

Our guide Felix had been up the mountain 157 times and said those were the hardest conditions he's ever encountered as long as he's been climbing the mountain.

Normally 75% of all males make it to Gilman's Point, while 80% of females make it (more actual numbers of men climb the mountain, but percentage-wise females do better).

During the unusual period we were there, only about 10% of climbers were making it to Gilman's Point, and fewer than 5% to the top.

No one made it to Gilman's the day after we made it, just like Felix had predicted.

Two days later eight Chileans made the top. One of them had been to the top of Everest. Even he said Kili was incredibly hard. He recommended I skate the 7 tallest mountains of the world.

For what it's worth I have a certificate saying I climbed up and down Kilimanjaro on skates.