I think my career as a high altitude mountain climber is over. That was brutal. The day started at 8am when a jeep picked myself and Jennifer up from the hostel. We took a quick ride out to the base of the mountain and the elevation at the start of the hike was 3415 meters. That´s 11,201 feet for those of you keeping track at home. We could feel the elevation immediately and sure enough, Jennifer and the guide were soon blowing me away. Towards the end, when we were hiking north of 13k ft, the two of them were so far ahead of me I couldn´t see them. We needed to make it to base camp at 4600 meters for the night, about 15,000 ft.
A little background information. The highest elevation I´ve been at is a little over 13k ft while skiing at Aspen. The highest elevation I´ve slept at was a little over 10k ft at Vale pass in CO while trucking. The mountain I climbed today was 19,101 ft...I was a little worried going into this.
The climb up to base camp was mostly uneventful until the end when we met another group of climbers. Ben and Nick joined us as well as a German couple. Ben and Nick were 18 and 19 respectively. Nick had run a marathon in the past 2 years and Ben grew up in Durango, CO and liked to do extreme skiing for a leisure time activity. Awesome, more people to make me feel old and slow. All 4 people were actually great company and Nick and Jen have me convinced that I need to visit Vancouver, B.C. asap.
Our guides, Alberto and Aldo, cooked for us over propane stoves and the food was good, although at that point I would have eaten anything. The sunset at base camp was glorious, sleeping there was not. I´m pretty sure I didn´t sleep a wink the whole night. The elevation made my head hurt, my feet were freezing, and the pad I was sleeping on did little to make me forget about the rocks beneath me. The schedule called for us to go to bed around 8pm and get up at 2am to start climbing in the dark. Yeah, climbing in the dark. We used head lamps for that part. The harsh landscape and flat night lighting made it seem as if we were hiking on the moon. We could see the lights of Arequipa off in the distance. It seemed as if we were looking at the city from an aircraft.
The climbing was technically very easy. We didn´t need any ropes or anything like that at all. It was basically a long, hard, up hill hike. However, it was at 15k ft plus. I´ve experienced the shortness of breath that comes with high elevation but this was a whole new level of pain. Jen actually dropped out and returned back to the base camp with one of the guides about 2 hours into that morning´s hike. I felt bad for her as I was the one who asked her to do this with me. She was freezing and looked like hell.
Around the time Jen stopped, Nick and Ben jumped ahead of the group and were soon out of site. I continued hiking with one of the guides and the german couple. The man´s name was Fabian and I think the woman was named Anchik.
Around 18,000 ft I kinda hit a wall. From that point on I was stopping for rest every 15 minutes. I considered quitting many times but I knew I would regret it. I had put myself through too much to make it to that point. With encouragement from Aldo, I continued hauling myself through each field of boulders, each plain of volcanic ash, the smell of sulfur occasionally stinging my nose. It sounds nuts I know, but I now understand that urge to reach the top of a mountain just to say you´ve done it.
I did finally reach the top. Well, not the tippy top. I´ll admit there were ridges surrounding the crater and I probably could have climbed up another 500 ft or so, but I was done. I had reached a physical limit. Sitting on the ground was strenuous. I had to purposefully pant like a dog to stay conscious. Aldo gave me a big hug and took pictures for me. I really don´t have very good pics of the top because I was too exhausted to walk around and take them.
Aldo then told me to sit and rest while he went to find Nick and Ben. At the time we didn´t know that they had already gone down. The german couple was up on one of the ridges and completely out of site. Aldo was gone for a while and I soon realized that I was slowly suffocating. I was literally exhausting myself breathing hard enough to keep from passing out. I almost did pass out a couple times. I figured it was a kind of a bad idea to take off back down the mountain without the guide, but I figured it was a worse idea to stay there and die, and I really did think that was a possibility.
Thankfully, getting down the mountain isn´t that tough if you take the right path and I sorta kinda knew where I was going. There are these shoots of volcanic ash down the sides of the volcano and walking down them is very easy and not strenous at all. It´s actually quite a bit of fun; like running down a huge hill of sand. After loping down the mountain about a thousand feet I felt worlds better and didn´t have to work at breathing any more. Unfortunately, I only kinda sorta knew where I was going. I was aware that I had left the guide at the top of the mountain without telling him where I was going, which is a bad move albeit a neccessary one in this case. I was worried and actually got to the point where I was taking stock of what I had on my person in case I really did need to hike all the way off the mountain and go find a road or something. Aldo did end up catching up to me though, and he told me I did the right thing by getting to a lower elevation.
I made it back to base camp, where we packed everything up. Jen was mostly recovered from her altitude sickness and we hiked the rest of the way back down the mountain. Making it back to 12k ft elevation felt amazing. I could walk again!
This probably sounds like a masochistic toture tale but it was far from that. Being that high up was special somehow, the fact that I was able to do it was also special. I don´t think I want to do it again any time soon, but I´m very glad I did it.
Way to go Joey!
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