It was pitch black out as Cara Blair and Abby Berg approached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Their headlamps, along with those of the over 80 other people in their group, illuminated the snowy path a few feet ahead of them. About eight hours into the hike, they were patiently waiting for the sun to rise.
Around 7 a.m., it finally did.
“Before that, you really couldn't see much,” Berg said. “You saw the lights of a far-off city, Moshi, but you couldn't see much. So, the sun started coming up, and the views were just outrageous. And you could see the clouds below you and the whole sky.”
At the top, at 19,341 feet, they found a wooden sign signifying they had made it. They took a photo and soaked in the view. Just 20 minutes later, it was time to go back down.
Blair and Berg participated in the eight-day hike last month through Kidney Donor Athletes, an organization that raises awareness for kidney donations. According to the Indiana Donor Network, 13 people die each day waiting for an organ transplant. Every eight minutes, another person is added to the national transplant waiting list, which currently has over 100,000 people. People wait an average of three to five years to get a transplant.
Blair and Berg donated their kidneys a few years ago. In 2025, 4.5 million Hoosiers signed up to donate an organ, and 1,379 organs were transplanted to recipients nationwide, saving 1,214 lives.
“I didn't have any children of my own. I have two stepchildren,” Blair said, “but I thought, since I didn't bring anyone into this world, that maybe I could help somebody stay longer. So, it was kind of just that aha moment one day of seeing somebody in need and thinking, you know, I really could make a difference and help save somebody's life.”
As a nurse, Berg enjoys taking care of people, so donating a kidney felt natural for her.
“I went to the IU Health transplant site, and was in bed one night, and I looked at my husband, and I'm like, I'm going sign up to donate a kidney. And he's like, all right. And so I did it.”
Soon after donating, Blair and Berg applied to go on the hike to Mount Kilimanjaro through Kidney Donor Athletes. They were two of 16 people accepted. Blair, who lives in Greenwood, and Berg, who’s based in Bloomington, started going on training hikes at Lake Monroe together with others in the area to prepare.
“A lot of it [training] was over the winter when it was extremely cold, so that was beneficial in some respects, because some nights were extremely cold. You got to test out all of your winter gear,” Blair said. “But we did have the disadvantage of, we didn't have any altitude to train in, so we did our best with step machines and finding parks that had any type of hills, but it was a little bit challenging in the Midwest compared to some people who were in Colorado.”
Blair and Berg also had a week-by-week training schedule for the months leading up to the hike, which they said was challenging. The schedule called for them to go on six- to-eight-hour hikes on the weekends to build endurance for the final eight-day hike. Both had to find ways to incorporate that training into their day-to-day lives.
“I travel a lot with my kiddos for hockey and other sports,” Berg said, “So I'd do half of the hike in the morning, and then I'd be at a hockey game and I just had a pack that was, like, 25 pounds, and I just wore it everywhere. I'd mow the lawn with it. I would do circles.”
The hike to the top
Starting on day one of the hike, Blair and Berg said, the group clicked immediately, bonding through having donated their kidneys. Every day, they exchanged stories and talked as they got closer to the top. Their focus for the eight-day hike was hiking, eating and sleeping.
“It was kind of that feeling of being a kid again,” Berg said. “And maybe just that some of the responsibility of being a mom and, you know, working and not doing that for a few weeks was wonderful.”
Mount Kilimanjaro is made up of five ecological climate zones: cultivation, rain forest, heath and moorland, highland alpine desert and arctic summit. Blair and Berg had to bring clothes for all temperatures but were limited to only 33 pounds of belongings they could bring with them.
“There were a lot of elements of surprise, and it does keep you extremely engaged,” Berg said. “We started in the jungle, and it's, you know, like 80 degrees, and there's monkeys and lush forest, and it's just gorgeous. And then the next day you wake up and you enter into a new ecosystem. So, it's a new hike every day. There was desert, there was moorland. There were rocky areas. When we got to the top, it was snow.”
Along with the 15 kidney donors, 66 porters also came along on the hike. Their job was to assist in any way they could, including cooking, setting up camp and carrying supplies. Every morning at 6 a.m., one of them would wake everyone up.
“Good morning!” they said. “How did you sleep? Would you like coffee or hot chocolate or tea?”
They would come back at 6:30 a.m. to distribute bowls of warm water to wash up and brush teeth. Everyone had to be ready at 7 a.m. for breakfast before taking off for the day.
As the hikers started, the porters packed up camp. Then, they would follow in the hikers’ footsteps toward the next stop. At some point, they would pass the hikers, even while carrying duffel bags on their backs and on their heads. Once the porters reached the next campsite and set everything up, they would go back to the hikers and help them the rest of the way. The porters also cooked them an array of meals, including tacos, pizza and French fries. Blair and Berg said they treated them “like royalty.”
“Their only goal was to see us succeed and get us to the top,” Blair said, “and whatever that took, if they carried our bag, if they walked along with us to help us through, and they just seemed to be these angels that would appear when you needed them to help you over a difficult part, or just to make sure that you were safe.”
Early in the hike, the group encountered a river crossing where the rocks people would normally step on to cross were completely covered with water. The porters rolled down boulders from the surrounding area to make a bridge for people to cross. And the day before the group reached the summit, at 15,000 feet, the porters made a birthday cake for one of the donor’s birthdays.
“It really was amazing that they just went above and beyond to make sure that everybody felt special, to celebrate with us,” Blair said. “So, I just thought it was amazing.”
On the sixth day, the group hiked about five miles in the morning and then rested until 10 p.m. that night. That’s when they started the summit push. Eight hours later, after hiking through the snow in the dark, energized from drinking a slushy mixture of Coca Cola and Red Bull, they reached the top as the sun was rising. But they only stayed at the summit for about 20 minutes.
“There is a sign at the very top. It's a very plain wood sign that you get your picture taken with. They want to get you down fairly quickly,” Blair said. “You're at 19,000 feet. The air is very thin. You've been climbing for eight hours. They were very concerned about people's safety.”
The group hiked five hours back to camp to eat and rest and then continued down another seven hours. The next day, they hiked the remaining four hours to the bottom.
“The camaraderie is what got us down,” Berg said.
The group raised about $107,000 through the hike. Now, about a month after returning home, the group is still in touch and planning their next adventure together. After spending a week with people from Tanzania, Blair and Berg said they learned how to value the simple things in life.
“Seeing their culture and the way that they live their daily lives, that we have so many more conveniences, but they seem so happy in their simplicity, Blair said. “And that is something I hope --- that I can take time away from whatever electronic device and talk with people. There was one sign that we saw that said, ‘We do not have Wi-Fi, just talk to each other.’ And I think that's one of the things that we take back is, just the simplicity of having conversations with each other.”
