This week, I summited my first mountain, Mount Toubkal, at 13,671 ft, the highest point in North Africa, alhamdulillah (!!!) It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
On Sunday, I trekked 13.9 miles from Imlil to the Toubkal Refuge, ascending from 6,159 ft to 10,521 ft over 7.5 hours. On Monday, I climbed to the summit and back down to the refuge, over ice and wearing crampons for the first time, over 9.5 hours. On Tuesday, I rode a mule down from the refuge back to Imlil, and then drove to Marrakech and flew back to New York. Everything still seems so surreal.
Climbing my first mountain has taught me, at age 32, that the mind is so much more powerful than the body. These past three days were about learning to quiet the cacophony of voices in my head, about achieving new levels of endurance and stamina, about learning to overcome my fear of heights, of putting all my trust in God and in my guide, and going boldly where I had never gone before.
At the refuge
On Sunday night, when I arrived at the refuge, sore and shivering, I excitedly called my friend and mentor Nick Spanos to tell him about my accomplishment in just having made it so far. When I had first told him about my romantic notion of climbing a 13,000 foot high mountain, he laughed and told me it was impossible. “No way. You won’t be able to breathe up there and you’ll panic.”
I had been determined to prove him wrong, and I had done that, just by making it to the refuge, by tapping into abilities that I may have had lying dormant in me all along.
“That’s great,” he told me. “But the true accomplishment is in making it to the summit.”
“I’m so scared,” I told him. “Shouldn’t I be grateful for what God has let me achieve so far and quit while I’m ahead?”
He responded: “How will you ever know how much more ability God has given you until you try?”
I told him the mantras I had repeated to myself over that day’s journey.
“One step at a time is not too hard” “God will never cause my foot to stumble” “God is guiding me right now” “He will nourish me in ways I could never imagine” “He will provide for me a way out of every hardship”
Nick asked me what kind of jacket I was wearing. I told him it was a puffy yellow windbreaker I had rented in Imlil. “That’ll look great at the summit,” he told me, and for the first time, I visualized myself at the top, an image that was faint but gradually became clearer in my mind.
That night, I couldn’t sleep, and I was deeply torn between wanting to go back to Imlil the next morning, and wanting to try to reach the summit at the same time.
I shared my fears with my guide, Ibrahim, a master Berber mountaineer whose ancestors had been living in these mountains for thousands of years, and whose wrinkled face made him seem much older than his 55 years.
An hour before reaching the refuge, the path curved around the side of a mountain, and for a distance of maybe 100 feet, there was a sheer drop off on the left side, and the path was narrow and icy and wet.
I had started crying, and Ibrahim had held my hand and walked me across the ledge. Ibrahim told me that the way to the summit would have many similar ledges, even more scary than the one we had passed, so I would need to conquer my fears.
“But don’t worry,” he told me. “We’ll go slowly, slowly, shuwayya shuwayya, until we reach the top.”
“Qadam bi qadam ila al qimmah.” One step at a time, until the summit.
That night, I prayed, knowing that so many times on that day’s journey, things had seemed hopeless, I thought I had no more energy left, and always, God provided a way for me to keep going. “I don’t have the willpower to continue now, but when I wake up in the morning, I know you’ll give it to me.”
Summit day
All the other groups left the refuge between 4-5am on Summit Day, hoping to catch the sunrise at the top of the mountain. Ibrahim had said we would leave at 7am, so we could go at our own pace. As I saw everyone getting preparing and getting dressed in the wee hours of the morning, I felt like I had failed, that they would all reach the summit, while I would wake up and go back to Imlil.
So I took my time putting on my clothes, and eating breakfast. I was so afraid and I had barely been able to sleep the night before. By the time we left the refuge, it was 8:10am, and it was starting to become bright out, and I suddenly realized I was a little less scared. I told myself I would go as far as I can, for at least an hour, and then turn back when I could go no further.
That first hour was the hardest hour of my life as we made our way up a steep hill on the narrowest of trails, with a drop off to our left that became bigger and bigger as we kept walking. I kept checking my watch to see how close we were to one hour and Ibrahim told me to stop doing that. I asked him if we could rest. I was struggling to breathe and could barely keep up with him. He had always been accommodating before.
“La, feehi khatar jiddan jiddan jiddan,” he told me. “No, there is tremendous danger here.” We have to keep going until the boulders, he told me. And so I kept going, counting paces, telling myself I would go 100 paces, then pause for five seconds, and keep going, and so forth.
We finally made it to the boulders at 10:27am. I checked our altitude on the Gauges app and saw we were at 11,814 ft. We were 1/3 of the way there!!! But our pace meant it would take us more than 6 hours to get to the top, and then who knows how long to get back down. My eyes started tearing up and I told Ibrahim I didn’t think we would make it.
“Look at the sun up there,” he told me, where the sun, hiding behind the tremendous south face of Toubkal was lighting up the ice. “We’ll just go up until we can see the sun.”
So we kept going. And something amazing happened - we started running into climbers descending the mountain, folks who had left at 4am and were now returning. I saw my friend Malick, who I had met the previous day, a tall and athletic Senegalese medical student studying in Rabat who told me had been dreaming of summiting Toubkal for the past two years. When I had told him I wanted to go home, he said “We’ve come so far, we might as well see how much farther we can go.” He hugged me and told me the view from the summit was beautiful.
Then I ran into a group of Americans and Europeans whom I had also run into on the previous day’s trek from Imlil. One of the young women, Rachel, had seen me struggling the day before a little after the Shrine of Sidi Chamarouch, and she asked me my name. She told me her name was Rachel and said “I’ll see you at the refuge.” That small gesture had helped me so much. Now she started cheering and told me “We’ve been rooting for you all day!” I felt like crying.
One of her friends, Sara Lynn, told me “Just make it to that ridge up there! The view from there is as good as from the summit and you can see the entire Sahara. The last half hour to the summit is horrible and is non stop hugging rocks, so just get to the ridge!”
I asked them how much farther the ridge was 30 or 40 minutes, I asked hopefully. “More like 2-3 hours,” they told me, but no matter, I felt a rush of energy, and told myself that I was getting stronger with every step.
Finally, their friend Benjamin passed by, a Dutch adventure consultant based in the Bay Area. He had heard Sara Lynn telling me to just get to the ridge. He grabbed my shoulders and looked at me squarely. “All the way to the top, you hear? All the way to the top.” And I heard his voice telling me that every step of the way for the next 3 hours.
When we finally made it to the ridge, it was 1:15pm, and my phone showed we were at 13,040 feet. I sat down and ate the Berber trail mix Ibrahim had packed. The ice had finished and there seemed to be so much more rock face above us. And this is when the voices in my head became louder than ever. Telling me I couldn’t make it to the top, telling me to lie down and take a nap, telling me that even if I made it to the top, there was no way I would get back down. I laughed at the voices, knowing that I was so close to my goal, that this was the last desperate ploy of my self sabotaging self.
Nick had told me the day before, in his Yoda like manner: “I’m not sure you should reach the summit, you might become too powerful.”
Ibrahim snapped me out of my inner conflict and told me we had to keep moving. The rest of the way was loose scree and he took my hand, and soon, it became tremendously scary, requiring complex footwork to maneuver our way to the summit, with steep dropoffs on all sides. I was so scared but I turned my brain off and put my complete trust in Ibrahim. Many times, I cried “Kayfa?!” when I saw a complex move, and didn’t know how I would get to the next stage, and he told me “Put this foot here, then here, then here.”
At the top
And then, it was 2:13pm, and we were at the top. I wish I could say I felt brave and powerful, like a conqueror, that all of a sudden, my self image had changed forever - “Hamdan Azhar, who literally almost did not graduate high school because he failed gym twice, was now a Mountain Climber.”
But I was scared more than ever, knowing I would now have to repeat everything I had done over the past 6 hours, in reverse. When Ibrahim went to squat on a rock to take hero shots of me, my self sabotaging self showed me a video of him falling off the steep drop behind him, and me being all alone on the summit, night fall approaching, and me having no way of making it back.
But he didn’t fall, and we made it back to the summit ridge, and we finally had the “picnic” he had been dangling before me all day. (“We’ll just hike for an hour, then have a picnic, and come back,” he had told me.)
We had bread and cheese and boiled eggs and oranges. I wish I could say I enjoyed the food but I was terrified. I kept doing the math of how it had taken us 6 hours to summit, and then spent half an hour eating, and how would we ever make it back before night fall.
The way back
But we kept going. And then we ran into a group of three Slovak climbers making their way up! I asked the first one if he was German and he said he was Slovak, and I asked him what was the capital city there, and he told me it was Bratislava. And a few minutes later, when the last of the group passed by, I said “Let me guess, are you from Bratislava?” and he was so happy I had known! I told him they were really close to the summit. (Now I was the one descending from the summit encouraging straggling climbers haha.)
We finally made it back to the refuge at 5:30pm. I discovered that my mom had been praying and crying all night because she hadn’t heard from me since I had arrived at the refuge.
I also saw I had missed several calls from Nick and also a text message: “You are powerful beyond measure.”
The following morning, we left at 7am, and hiked for 30 minutes before the ice turned to rock and then I got on the mule to descend the rest of the way to Imlil. It was a steep, narrow, path and my guide told me to remain absolutely calm so as not to frighten the mule. And it was really scary!!! Every time, the mule took a big step downward, I had to squeeze my thighs as hard as I could to keep from falling off. And I held on with one hand in a hold in front of me, and the other hand twisted behind me holding on to another hold. I asked my guide what was the mule’s name, and he told me “The Mule” (Al Baghlah), probably because he was afraid I might say the mule’s name at the wrong time and it would have an unintended effect.
We finally reached the village of Armoud, and we approached an incredibly narrow dirt path with many switchbacks that would take us down to Imlil. I told my guide I would walk the rest of the way for the last half an hour, and I counted my paces for the last time, telling myself that “In 30 minutes, this will all seem like a dream.”
And it still feels like a dream. Alhamdulillah ❤️.
P.S. I could not have done any of this without my guide, Ibrahim, who believed in me and encouraged me with tremendous patience, Nick Spanos, who told me exactly what I needed to hear at just the right time, Luma who summitted Toubkal last year and told me it was going to be amazing when I told her I had the crazy idea of following in her footsteps, Sarangi who told me this was a great idea before she googled Mount Toubkal and found out how high it was haha, and all of the friends I made on the mountain. Even my friend Baha who when I asked him about going hiking to see the waterfalls in Imlil, he told me I shouldn't do it because I was out of shape and it would be embarrassing hahaha and then I absolutely had to not only prove him wrong but go much harder than he had cautioned me against going. And my family of course because what kept me going in the most difficult moments was knowing I had to make it back to call my parents and tell them I was okay otherwise they'd be worried. Okay that's all for now 😀 #writings
