As the air thinned and their breathing grew labored under a full moon, a Lakeway-based team of climbers focused on what brought them thousands of miles to summit Mount Kilimanjaro.

Tucker Wood, Timothy Osburn and Allen Devino, three Life Scouts from Boy Scout Troop 52, were climbing for Shelter Box, an organization that supplies portable emergency shelters to disaster areas around the world.

Melinda Osburn of Lakeway never thought she would take on a mountain halfway around the world, but her thirst to bring clean water to Belize as part of a Lakeway/Lake Travis Rotary Club initiative spurred her onward and upward. She’s the Lakeway/Lake Travis Rotary Club president for the 2010-11 Rotary year.

Both Osburn and the scouts took pledges and donations from supporters. When all the donations are counted upon their return, they’ll turn over proceeds to the respective causes.

“I have to have a cause because I can’t do stuff like this for nothing,” she said. “I wanted to build awareness of Lakeway/Lake Travis Rotary Club and what they do.”

The club’s clean water projects, work to provide free medical equipment to a hospital in Matamoros, Mexico, and adoption awareness program form a mountain of their own.

The contingent of adventurers assembled from Lakeway and across the state — nicknamed the Texas Sweet 16 — embarked on a journey that pushed them to their physical and mental limits in a deep-of-night ascent up Africa’s tallest peak with the Swahili phrase their porters live by ‘pole, pole’ or ‘slowly, slowly’ running through their minds as they took each laborious step.

Their missions also became the mind-set that took all but one of the climbers – who made it down safely after succumbing to Acute Mountain Sickness – to the top. The team reached the top July 27.

“If you would have told me I would have stood on top of the highest mountain summit in Africa a year ago I would have told you are crazy!” Melinda wrote on her blog.

Timothy’s father and Melinda’s husband, Tim Osburn climbed Kilimanjaro and served as the ringleader who started rounding up his son’s Scouting friends and family seven months ago to go on the adventure of a lifetime.

“Certain people were asked that have the physical capability and [whose personalities] would fit our group,” he said.

The elder Osburn didn’t have to twist any arms.

“I had always hoped to climb it actually. I had heard about it, so when the opportunity came I thought it was great,” Wood said before he and the Texas Sweet 16 started leaving the U.S. on July 18.

Forty porters carried their equipment, but the climbers spent several months training so they could transport their bodies to the mountaintop over the course of six days.

The scouts trained by regularly hiking SODA Hill, a 500-foot hill near the Lakeway World of Tennis Center named for Tim Osburn and some of his buddies, tackling any stairclimber in the vicinity and hitting the gym.

“When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Ugh, that’s a big hill,’ but now it’s normal. It’s not as bad [to climb] as it was,” Devino said.

Texas Sweet 16 members also spent up to five hours at a time in an enclosed altitude tent in the Osburns’ living room that simulated conditions at13,000 feet elevation to help them acclimatize.

“We look like lab rats sitting in it. It is funny when someone comes up to the plastic window, points and says ‘I want that one,’” Melinda wrote.

She worked out on the stairclimber and gym to get her heart rate down to 30 beats per minute.

Tim Osburn said the reward of the slow, arduous trek in which climbers suffer altitude headaches, is reaching the summit as the African sun rises.

“It’s just an all-night slog,” he said. “It’s almost maddening how slow you have to go with the acclimatization.”

The team took the western approach that put them at Machame Hut camp on their first day, and the next morning they set out to climb four hours to Sheer Plateau.

The third day they reached Lava Tower at almost 15,000 feet and finished at Barranco Valley that Osburn described as one of the most unique places in the world.

“It’s like Alice in Wonderland,” he said. “The trees and plants are really cool.”

They scaled Barranco Wall to Karanga Camp and then reached the high camp of Barfu, a staging point as they entered the arctic summit zone.

“We began the summit assault at 10:30 p.m. I felt good but the climb was so steep and I knew I had nine hours of solid climbing ahead of me,” Melinda wrote. “We slowly grinded up the mountain under the full moon. All through the night I climbed I can tell you childbirth is easier!”

She held onto the promise a Rotary district governor made to her that he would donate $100 to the Clean Water for Belize program.

“I climbed on for clean water. In my mind one family would have clean water if I made it,” she wrote. “I climbed on and we cried at the summit.”

After a three-day hike down Kilimanjaro, Texas Sweet 16 is wrapping up their African adventure by going on safari on the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania in hopes of seeing the Big Five animals before returning home Saturday.

“I just like that sense of adventure,” Wood said.

Although the adventurer seekers accomplished their mission of reaching the top of Kilimanjaro, the Scouts saw the bigger picture of their trip.

“Hopefully someday I’ll be able to do it with my kids and do it for another good cause,” Timothy Osburn said.

For information on Lakeway/Lake Travis Rotary Club and Shelter Box, visit www.laketravisrotary.org and www.shelterbox.org, respectively.