CAF Story | Reaching new heights
Video / May 03, 2024
Transcript
I felt good during the whole ascent, it was still a very difficult mountain. There were no less than eight evacuations by helicopter during the trip due to mountain sickness, altitude sickness. It can be quite a challenge. But at 8:16 a.m. on July 10, 2023, I was at the summit of Kilimanjaro, at an altitude of 5,895 metres, celebrating our victory.
Hello, I’m Naval Lieutenant Thomas Morin-Cabana, an intelligence officer currently assigned to Canadian Joint Operations Command Headquarters in Ottawa. So, the purpose of the #InfinitePotential mission was to raise funds for a charitable organization by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. In early July, I left for Tanzania. When you arrive at Kilimanjaro, you arrive at the airport, and it’s a really small airport. It’s in the middle of nowhere. We got a good night’s sleep. We got ready, and after that, we drove to the base of the mountain. We prepared all our equipment, we made sure we had everything on us, that we were ready, and we started up the mountain.
It's so beautiful, right? By the second day, we had stopped saying that. After we’d been climbing for an hour, the jungle disappeared and it became a bit like a desert climate. The climb became very steep. It’s 17 kilometres. So it’s a very, very long journey.
But the problem and the challenge came at the end of Day five. Because we arrived early at the camp on Day 5, and after that, we took a nap so we could get up at 11:00 p.m. on Day 5 to climb the rest of the way to the summit at night. Because we wanted to be up there at sunrise on Day six to watch the sun come up, but also to have enough time for the descent afterwards. The nighttime ascent was completely unlike anything we’d seen. Because during the day, in Africa, it’s going to be more than 25, more than 30 degrees. But during the night, the temperature drops to minus 20. You try to drink water to stay hydrated, but your Camelbak is frozen. So you do everything you can to put one foot in front of the other, and that’s when you learn the true meaning of perseverance. And in the end, after enormous effort, after enormous work, you arrive on the last slope of the mountain. And the sun is rising in front of you and you’re at the summit of Kilimanjaro at an altitude of 5,895 metres. It’s really something to be proud of.
I had brought a Canadian flag, of course, because I’m proud of my country, and I’m proud to serve it. I had also brought the Canadian Armed Forces flag to represent all the strength it had required of me, which was due to my training with the Canadian Armed Forces. A lot of my colleagues who were there had no hiking experience, and I had to give them a crash course. Being proactive, being effective, being able to help the next person, keeping an eye on the others, looking at their medical condition if there’s a problem, things like that, seeing if things are okay. So that was very important, and it was thanks to my military experience that I was able to put it into practice.
The work of an intelligence officer is very interesting, especially when you start working at Joint Operations headquarters. As you probably know, for the past few years there have been all kinds of socio political realities all over the world which are very complex. That requires a huge amount of attention, a huge amount of monitoring, to understand what’s happening, analyze, recommend actions to the chain of command in order to ensure that Canadians, here and abroad, are safe, but also that the world is a little bit more peaceful.
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