Aleksander Doba

On February 22, 2021, Aleksander Doba made the last few strides to the top of Kilimanjaro, a pleased seventy-four-year-old man, waving to fellow climbers with his envy-inducing muscular arms, a smile beaming from behind the curls of a wild beard. He shouted his happiness for achieving his goal of climbing this mountain with the enchanting name. Doba took a look around, admiring the view from the world’s highest freestanding mountain, sat down on a nearby rock, and died.

While it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that a man of that age would die of high-altitude pulmonary edema at such an elevation, it might surprise many who knew him that after all Doba had been through, hiking to the top of Kilimanjaro would kill him. Some might have been surprised that anything could.

Late in life, Doba paddled solo across the Atlantic Ocean three times. He was sixty-five years old on his first crossing. He was seventy during his final crossing in 2017. He holds a bushel