BAY ST. LOUIS – For St. Rose de Lima parishioner Jim Otis, there truly ain’t no mountain high enough.

Otis can now scratch “climb Mount Kilimanjaro” off of his bucket list.

Otis was part of a 12-person group who scaled Mt. Kilimanjaro, which is located in the African country of Tanzania, at the end of 2009.

“This is not a walk in the park. This is a very difficult hike,” he said. “The training alone is difficult. I’m a 50 year-old guy and was a well-recognized athlete for much of my younger life and thought this would be a walk in the park for me. It was not. There were 12 on my team and no one thought that they would make the summit.”

It took eight days from start to finish for Otis and his group to complete the climb.

They took off at midnight on New Year’s Eve from the base of the summit and reached the top in about eight-and-a-half hours.

“It’s unbelievably difficult,” said Otis of the grueling, straight-up climb.

This was Otis’ first climb.

He wasn’t scared but said, “It isn’t as easy as the information on the websites would lead you to believe.”

“There’s some hard stuff,” he said. “They’ve got helicopter pads. They’ve got stretchers along the way. Stuff happens to people. A couple of people die there every year.”

The temperature dips to minus 20 practically every night.

“It was supposed to be good weather, but it was rainy, icy, sleeting, snowing and very cold the whole time,” he said. “We had breaks in the weather, especially in the morning, where it was beautiful and the sun was shining. You got a little warm and would see blue skies and that’s where I took the bulk of my pictures. Other than that, it was very, very cold.”

Otis said he trained for about a month and a half for his climb but, knowing what he knows now, says, ideally, one would need about 90 days to properly train for the climb.

The toughest part of the climb, he said, was the muscle fatigue.

“The first five days, I was okay but, the sixth and seventh day climbing to the top and then having to come down 19,340 feet on that steep grade, is an incredible pressure on the legs, on the quadriceps and the knees and the rest of your body,” he said. “Coming down, the air was okay. Going up, it was hard to breathe. Coming down was horrible on the legs.”

Reaching the highest peak, Uhuru Peak, Otis said, was an incredible feeling. Before reaching the top, one must first hit Stella Point, which is separated from the highest peak by a 45 minute walk.

“When I made Stella Point, I didn’t think I could go any further,” Otis said. “I couldn’t see Uhuru Peak, but I was encouraged. The guides that we had on this trip were phenomenal. I ate with them. They sang to us. They encouraged me. At one point, one of the guides had to take my pack off of my back and let me walk alone. I wasn’t the only one. There were six of us that happened to. There was too much weight and too much pressure on the lungs. They have a saying, ‘pole-pole’, which means ‘slowly-slowly’. They walk incredibly slowly on the way up.”

Otis said he was overcome with emotion upon reaching Uhuru Peak.

“When I stepped over the ridge and actually saw the wooden sign to Uhuru Peak, I don’t know what came over me, but I burst out into tears. I saw a lot of people that happened to be doing the same thing over by the sign, but I burst out into tears when I saw the destination like a couple of hundred yards from me. It was something that just came out of the deepest part of me. I couldn’t believe I had made it. I had been praying the whole way up – in my tent, in my steps counting rocks and footsteps. We hiked 56 miles and 48 of them were up.”

Otis, whose dad was a Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force, was born in Morocco, so this was, in effect, his first trip home to Africa.  He grew up in New England and attended several schools all over the country while growing up because his dad was constantly being transferred.  

After graduating from Bishop Guertin High School in Nashua, New Hampshire, Otis decided he wanted to become a merchant marine and see the world.

A year later, he left the merchant marines, returned to New Hampshire and graduated from the University of New Hampshire. Eventually, he moved to New York City where he remained from 1990 to 2002. During that time, he owned a real estate company in Manhattan and, after witnessing firsthand the horror of the 9/11 attacks, he took a job with a roofing business in Texas and, after a couple of years, started his own company.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Otis came to Biloxi with his former employer at the roofing company and, all in all, they put on nearly 3,000 roofs. Eventually, his cohorts at the roofing company returned to Texas, but Otis decided to remain on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and help with the rebuilding effort. He bought a home in Bay St. Louis and started remodeling homes and buying homes and renting them out.

“This isn’t my home, but I decided to stay and make it my home,” he said.

Otis owns a construction company in Bay St. Louis, a roofing company in Texas and dabbles in real estate and is also a partner in small Los Angeles-based film company.

After he reached Uhuru Peak, Otis held up several signs, including one of St. Rose de Lima Parish.

Otis said the parish has a special meaning to him.

“I wasn’t a regular churchgoer my whole life,” he said. “When I got to St. Rose de Lima, there was some spirit there that was way different than in any of the other churches I had been to in my whole life. I like going there. I liked hearing (former pastor Father Sebastian Myladiyil) speak. I like the community inside, the energy. You just feel the presence of God inside that little church. The closest I’ve ever felt to God has been inside St. Rose de Lima and I prayed on the way up, ‘Please, let me make it’ and I made it and I was amazed.”

Only one member of Otis’s group did not make it to Uhuru Peak and, once you do make it to the top, you’re only allowed 15 minutes before beginning your descent, partly because it’s bitter cold and you don’t want to risk hypothermia and partly because there are many people gathered for photo ops and they like to keep the crowds moving.

“We just happened to be one of the last groups up there, so we had it to ourselves and stayed up there for about 40 minutes,” he said,

Otis said it took one-and-a-half days for his group to make their descent, as opposed to the eight days it took to make the climb.

Otis plans to incorporate Mt. Kilimanjaro into a future documentary promoting the mission of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America.

He says his experience climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro has taught him a very valuable lesson that he wants to share with others.

“You can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it,” he said.