People who knew nothing about climbing asked them, “Why?.” People who climb themselves asked, “How?”

“It’s the exhilaration of achieving something that few people have done. We felt the same exhilaration,” said Sam Atwood and Craig Kiser of Florida, USA, on having climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, at 19,340 feet, the highest peak in Africa.

Both men are blind. Kiser has retinitis pigmentosa and has been totally blind for seven years, while Atwood was born with congenital glaucoma. Kiser, 58, is the director of Florida's Division of Blind Services and Atwood, 28, is the agency's client advocate.

Their adventure began a year ago when Atwood went to the Italian Alps for a conference on assistive technology for people with disabilities. It was there that he met Erik Weihenmayer, also blind, and one of the few people in the world who have climbed the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent.

Deeply impressed, Atwood stayed in touch with Weihenmayer, who asked if he would be interested in joining a group of climbers, some of them disabled, to scale Kilimanjaro. Atwood went to Kiser to seek his advice. Kiser said, “Not only are you going, I'm going too.”

Atwood and Kiser prepared themselves physically and mentally for the climb. Their training for the Kilimanjaro climb was not particularly high-tech. Atwood had done a lot of climbing earlier on rock walls as well as spinning classes and hiking. Kiser was trained on a stair stepper and treadmill, often wearing a backpack loaded with canned food, the kind of weight they needed to carry while climbing Kilimanjaro. They did the practice climb at Quandary Peak in Colorado before setting out to climb Kilimanjaro.

There were a total of 28 climbers in their group , seven of whom were blind. Their eight-day expedition took them through five climate zones, from a rainforest to a glacier. "The last leg of the climb was done at night, because the ice on the glacier becomes too slippery during the day,” said Kiser.