There is an African myth about Kilimanjaro.

The story goes: as you climb the mountain, you are like an eagle—as you ascend, you begin to shed your feathers—first the top layer, then the middle feathers, then the bottom layer, and finally you shed your beak. So by the time you reach the top, you are reborn. You grow new feathers, and your beak becomes re-formed—you are a new, stronger eagle, ready to soar.

Day 2 of our climb took us out of the rainforest and into the moorlands, so our view opened up to see the climb ahead of us. The landscape is spectacular—grassy hills, short , gnarly black trees, electric yellow flowers. We reached a point where we were above the first level of clouds, so we also looked out on a blanket of cotton candy.

We're definitely feeling the increased difficulty due to altitude, but our guides have been great about keeping the pace—"Pole pole" (pol-ay pol-ay) they say to remind us... "Slowly, slowly."

We arrived at our second camp at around 5pm, and the place was just abuzz. There were a lot of people, and guides scurrying all over the place... The dinner building was chaos.

We went to bed at around 8:30 under a clear sky and a nearly full moon, and we could see the snow on the peak of Kilimanjaro shining far above us. Magical.

Sunday morning. Today is a rest day—in part to let us acclimatize but mainly because we have a pretty gruelling 2 days ahead of us.

Tomorrow we will climb for 6 hours to Kibo, our next camp, and it is getting steeper and harder to breathe. We will sleep briefly and then get up at midnight to depart for our summit climb.

So how are the girls faring? We are definitely seeing some nerves...and some challenges. The climb is more gruelling than some were anticipating, but larger than that is the mental challenge. They're homesick, they're feeling like "I'm 17, what am I doing on this mountain?"... And they're feeling afraid that they won't make it.

Today we've seen lots of long faces and quite a few tears.

Marnie gave the team a great motivating talk at breakfast about how we now need to see the team as a cable, and not a chain. A chain will always break at the weakest link, but a cable is made up of many small strands that wind around each other -- so each of us now has to wrap our strengths around another's weakness, and together we will become an unbreakable source of strength.

This is what a girl can do...