How Four Darden Students Ended Up on Top of Mount Kilimanjaro

Somewhere around 18,000 feet, with their heads pounding and hours still to go, four Darden students made a quiet decision: nobody was turning back.

It was just after midnight on a Tuesday in Tanzania. Ryder Sadler, Elena Céspedes Subirá, Max Strasser and Jack Horan (all MBA ’26) had been pushing through freezing temperatures and a pitch-black sky toward the 19,341-foot summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. They’d been on the mountain for nearly a week. This was the hardest part by far.

“At one point everybody felt like it was the hardest thing ever,” Strasser said. “You don’t know if you can go on.”

They did. The group summited at 7:05 a.m., at the highest elevation any of them had ever been. “We weren’t going to leave anyone behind,” Sadler said.

An Idea That Snowballed

The idea first surfaced while the group was discussing plans around a Darden Global Topics Course (GTC) in South Africa. Horan, who served as president of Darden’s Outdoors Club, had been floating the Kilimanjaro concept for some time before it gained any traction.

“I pitched it pretty early on and nobody was biting,” he said. Sadler was very hesitant at first, but eventually came around. Once he did, the rest of the group committed as well.

None of the four had known each other before beginning at Darden — Horan and Sadler met as classmates in Section C, while Céspedes Subirá and Strasser were on the same Learning Team — but after getting to know one another during First Year, planning something of this scale pulled the group together quickly. “We all independently wanted to do something big,” Strasser said. “And it’s easier to do something like this as a group.”

Preparing for the Climb

Climbing Kilimanjaro doesn’t require technical climbing experience, but it demands serious endurance. Each member of the group trained in their own way.

Céspedes Subirá spent stretches of an hour or more on the StairMaster building up her stamina for the long hiking days ahead. “It’s just about your breathing and being able to do it for a long time,” she said.

The altitude presented a different challenge. On a Darden ski trip in Colorado, Horan convinced Sadler to attempt a 14,000-foot peak just to test how their bodies would respond at elevation. “He literally pulled me out of bed,” Sadler said.

Horan also made repeated attempts to organize group training hikes in the Shenandoah Valley, with less success. “He would only ask on days when it was raining,” said Strasser.

Sadler and Strasser also took up swimming at the North Grounds Rec Center, meeting weekly with fellow Darden classmates before classes to build their aerobic base.

Eight Days on the Mountain

The group flew through Ethiopia to Tanzania, spent a day acclimatizing, then began their ascent via the Lemosho Route, a longer trail chosen specifically to allow gradual elevation gain and reduce the risk of altitude sickness. They hiked six to eight hours each day over seven days, moving through rainforest, alpine desert and steep summit biomes as they climbed.

While the hikers were hoping for good conditions, considering it was towards the end of the “short dry season,” the weather had other ideas. On the bus ride to the mountain, their guide stepped into a gas station and came back out with an umbrella. “When we got to the base of the mountain, it started raining hard,” Sadler said. “And it proceeded to rain every day.”

A fifth climber, John Burkly, accompanied the four, as well as a team of roughly 20 porters and guides who carried supplies, prepared meals and set up and broke down camp at each stop, often passing the hikers on the trail while shouldering 50 to 70 pounds.

For Céspedes Subirá, the relationships that formed with the team of porters became one of the trip’s most unexpected gifts. They exchanged card games and music, swapped stories about their daily lives and shared a friendship that made the experience feel cultural as well as physical. “There was a real sense of camaraderie,” she said. “They were very enthusiastic to share their culture and what their daily lives were like.”

Strasser found himself reflecting on the contrast between what the climb meant to the Darden group and what it meant to the people making it possible. “We’re tourists coming in from across the world to see it,” he said. “For them, this is day-to-day life and work.”

Support From the Darden Community

Making the trip work alongside the demands of business school required flexibility from faculty and staff. James Mitchell, Director of Global Programs, who helps coordinate Darden Worldwide Courses and has climbed Kilimanjaro himself, vetted the group’s travel plans, reviewed the company they hired and shared tips and photos from his own summit experience. Professors adjusted deadlines, allowed early presentations and accommodated exams taken in Tanzania prior to the climb. “Everyone thought it was a really cool thing we were doing,” Horan said. “They were very understanding.”

Sadler found a way to connect the trip directly to his coursework, pitching Professor Ed Freeman on writing his ethics final about tourism’s role in the Tanzanian economy, an essay he could write more meaningfully after witnessing it firsthand. Freeman was enthusiastic, and Sadler turned in the paper after returning home.

What Came Back With Them

The four graduated in May and are heading to careers in New York, Philadelphia, Denver and Charlottesville. As they reflect on their time at Darden, the climb sits near the top.

Céspedes Subirá draws a distinction between the mental challenge Darden puts in front of students and the kind the mountain demanded. “Darden itself is a mental challenge,” she said. “But this was a different type of endurance. There’s an element of perseverance in what we did that maybe we don’t get in the Darden classroom, and that will be useful in all parts of life.”

What all four keep coming back to, though, is simpler than any of that. They did something extraordinary together, and now they’ll always have that shared experience.