To prove he was not yet over the hill, Chattanooga-based attorney Hu Hamilton picked the tallest hill in Africa and climbed it. In a moment of poetic triumph, he reached the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro on his 60th birthday.
At 19,300 feet above sea level, Kilimanjaro is the tallest non-technical mountain climb in the world, meaning those who wish to scale its scenic heights do not need ice picks, clamp-ons or other special equipment. But that does not mean the brave souls who attempt to reach the volcanic crater at its peak can simply stroll up to the base of the mountain and keep walking. Rather, due to Kilimanjaro’s high elevation and steep terrain, one needs to be in prime physical condition to make the trek to the top, and commit almost nearly a week to taking on the mountain in small chunks.
An avid traveler, Hamilton planned his trip to Tanzania several months in advance. With Kilimanjaro looming in his future, he says he had no trouble finding the motivation to train.
“I tried to be more disciplined in getting in a couple of workouts every week, I did a lot of walking, and I tried to find places around Chattanooga where I could walk up a hill, such as the side of Lookout Mountain.
“I worked hard for about six months. I would sometimes carry a pack with 20 pounds in it to build up my strength. And right before I went on the trip, I spent 10 days in Santa Fe, N.M., which is 7,000 feet above sea level, and got acclimated to that.”
Hamilton and the small group with which he tackled the mountain slept overnight at increasingly higher elevations to get used to the altitude. By the time they reached the base of Mawenzi Peak, they were sleeping at 14,000 feet.
“Getting to that point was no big deal, but the next 5,000 feet were a real challenge. We’d go on acclimization hikes late in the day, and then come back down and rest until the next morning,” he says.
The group hit the summit on February 17. As the sun dawned on a new decade of life for Hamilton, he and the others were walking along the edge of one of the three volcanic cones that make up Kilimanjaro.
“We hit the summit on day four. Our guides woke us up at 11 o’clock the night before, and we did about 4,000 feet of vertical ascent while it was dark. There was about two feet of snow on the ground, and we couldn’t see where we were walking, but it was a clear night and the moon was almost full, so it was a spectacular hike. We hit the rim of the crater at six in the morning, just as it was getting light. That was something else,” he says.
From there, it was another three hours to Uhuru peak, the highest point on the mountain. Hamilton has a picture of himself standing in front of a sign marking the end of the climb, the word “Congratulations” painted in yellow behind him.
“I probably won’t do that again, but it was a great adventure,” he says.
Life back home
The account of Hamilton’s success on Kilimanjaro is simply the latest story in a life packed with fascinating anecdotes. Born in Atlanta, Ga., he grew up on the campus of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., where his dad taught as a professor. Although he was a math major at Vanderbilt University, he’d always had an interest in becoming an attorney, so he returned to Mercer to attend law school. He graduated in 1976.
Hamilton originally considered doing business and tax work, as he’d made high grades in those courses, but was steered toward trial work when he hung a shingle in Macon and the judge’s office began assigning him felony cases defending people who couldn’t afford a lawyer.
An avid outdoorsman, Hamilton moved to the Chatta-nooga area in 1979 to be closer to the places where he could camp, hike, and go white water paddling. For work, he took a job with Lindsay Bennett, an attorney with a civil trial and general practice in Rossville, Ga. Over time, the pair began to take on more and more personal injury cases, which demanded more and more resources, so Hamilton scaled back his other efforts until he eventually stopped taking other kinds of cases altogether by the mid-eighties.
Over the ensuing years, Hamilton refined his practice even further to focus primarily on catastrophic injuries. He was drawn to cases involving serious injury when he successfully sued a local hospital and pediatrician that had misdiagnosed a baby’s illness. The error had rendered the newborn “profoundly disabled,” and Hamilton’s work on the case led to a settlement that ensured the parents would be able to more easily take care of their child.
Hamilton says he enjoyed the opportunity to help his clients. “The quality of their lives improved because of what we were able to do for them, which made me feel good,” he says. Hamilton also likes the detective work that comes with piecing together what happened in a personal injury case and determining fault.
“A lot of what we do involves solving a mystery. A catastrophe has occurred, and it’s our responsibility to figure out who was responsible. So, we have to piece together a lot of forensic evidence. I enjoy doing that.”
In addition to serving his clients, Hamilton has devoted time to legislative issues related to his profession. For example, when the Georgia legislature in the mid-nineties passed a law that allowed the defendant in a personal injury case to reveal to the jury the kind of insurance an injured person had (in the hopes of reducing the amount of money awarded to the plaintiff), Hamilton and Bennett convinced the Georgia Supreme Court to declare the law unconstitutional.
Hamilton can spin the tales of his career for hours, as he’s secured significant settlements and broken new ground through cases on which he’s worked, but as his exploit on Kilimanjaro shows, he’s far more than a lawyer.
He’s a husband, a father of four, a grandfather of two, a talented amateur photographer, and an adventurous spirit who relishes every opportunity to experience what life has to offer.
He might not be eager to challenge Africa’s tallest peak again, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other mountains he’d like to climb.