Daily Photo – On the Summit of Mount Kinabalu

In the cold morning air on the summit of Mount Kinabalu we watched the sun rise and the colors of morning change all around us.

Two photos today. In the first, a fellow hiker looks at the scene to the south, illuminated by the soft rays of the recently risen sun. In the second photo, I'm holding a sign we found at the summit. In the spirit of ‘take only photographs, leave only footprints' this was my souvenir of the climb. On the right side of the photo is the steep drop into Low's Gully.

This photo is taken looking north and the coast of Sabah is clearly visible some 30 miles (50 km) away. Like the guy in the first photo, I'm wearing a pair of socks on my hands, in lieu of gloves. I can tell I was wearing a T-shirt under a Polo shirt, under a sweatshirt under a rain jacket. The piece of yellow rag on my head previously and later served as a neckerchief and general purpose rag but in this instance, tied over my ears it served to keep my ears warm.

Climbing to the summit of Mount Kinabalu had been a relative spur-of-the-moment thing so I hadn't planned for it. Indeed, apart from time spent on the mountain, you wouldn't need gloves or a hat (other than a sun hat) when traveling in this region.

If memory serves, this was about the coldest point because by now we'd been hanging around on the summit for about an hour. Some had already left on their way back down the mountain while others who'd missed making the peak for sunrise had decided to turn around and go back down. I'm not sure what I'd have done had I missed the sunrise. I would probably have continued on just to say I made it.

In our modern GPS, satellite mapped word, Low's Peak (the summit of Mount Kinabalu) is now classified at 4,095 meters (13,435 ft) – 6 meters (20 ft) lower than during the analogue days when this photo was taken. I wondered then who had carried this sign up the mountain. I wonder now if there's a new one with the digital height or not. And, like the ‘Slow Down' sign on the Tutoh River some 200 miles (320 Km) away in sarawak, I wonder why the admonition was only in English!