What It’s Like to Get Really, Really High

Ojos del Salado rises greater than twenty-two thousand toes above sea degree, on Chile’s northeastern border. It’s the world’s tallest volcano, towering over the world’s highest desert: an ash-and-scree-covered behemoth that exceeds Elbrus, Kilimanjaro, and Denali in measurement, if not renown. Its identify means “sources of the salty river,” or, probably, “eyes of salt,” which is what the brackish lagoons on its decrease reaches resemble when your mind is starved of oxygen. The wind and chilly are bother, too. Hypothermia and high-altitude pulmonary edema invisibly patrol the height, which a pair of Poles have been the primary to succeed in, in 1937. Nonetheless, Ojos is what mountaineers name a “walk-up.” There are not any crevasses or technical options on its commonplace route, only a comparatively easy rock scramble beneath the summit block.I gathered this a lot from studying journey studies, again in 2016, whereas planning an Ojos expedition of my very own. One notably memorable account of failure there described temperatures of twenty levels under zero and winds that drove “head-high icy particles which minimize our faces like sandpaper.” On the time I encountered that chilling sentence, I used to be a thirty-five-year-old freelance author dwelling in Atlanta. When requested why I needed to climb this volcano—slightly than a slighter one, or possibly a ski hill—I typically lazily cited George Mallory. “As a result of it’s there,” the English mountaineering legend mentioned, earlier than considered one of his pioneering makes an attempt at Mt. Everest, the place he would die in 1924.I didn’t wish to die. I simply needed to kick my tires a bit, to let nature throttle me once more. After I was twenty-one and meandering by faculty, I accomplished a two-thousand-mile hike of the Appalachian Path from Georgia to Maine. After 4 and a half months, I emerged emaciated, emboldened, and in want of a root canal from my every day Snickers dipped in Nutella. A couple of years later, I traced a two-hundred-mile loop by the mountains encircling Lake Tahoe, carrying a silver Speedo urged upon me by my youthful brother, Rob, who donned a floral quantity. I bagged a bunch of fourteen-thousand-foot peaks out West, whereas working for Exterior journal, and I even topped an eighteener, the Pico de Orizaba volcano, in Mexico, on a newspaper project. Climbing that one with Rob had entailed just some days of discomfort, although. A correctly acclimatized expedition up Ojos would require dwelling above fourteen thousand toes for every week, together with at the least one evening previous nineteen thousand—two-thirds the cruising altitude of a business airplane—the place there’s roughly half as a lot oxygen as you get pleasure from at sea degree.Three buddies and my brother agreed that Ojos provided a “Kind 2 Journey.” That’s, a perversely painful endeavor that we might fondly keep in mind endlessly. Lots of of planning e-mails adopted. It wasn’t sufficient to merely climb the volcano: we had determined to carry alongside mountain bikes. Just a few different people had apparently achieved so. Why not “catch a small aircraft into the mountain area, unload our gear, experience into the mountain, summit that beast, experience down and out. . . . Could be so sick!” Chris, a lawyer on the time, who turned our fantasist-in-chief, wrote. Justin, a business photographer, had by no means been a lot larger than fourteen thousand toes, however he was a powerful and reliable bike owner. Doug, a fastidious videographer, who deliberate to carry alongside his drone, was additionally inexperienced at elevation; to coach for the journey, he slept, usually joined by his spouse, inside an altitude-simulation tent for 2 weeks. “She’s cranky this morning and never pleased after our first full evening at 10,000,” he informed us at one level.Rob was by then a junior-high-school English trainer in San Diego. He had graduated from the Nationwide Outside Management Faculty, and had survived a number of summers climbing and slacklining round Yosemite Valley, the place, consistent with his aversion to constraints, he incessantly “raged off-trail.” He was additionally the one considered one of us who had ever climbed above twenty thousand toes: on Chimborazo, in Ecuador, and Stok Kangri, in India. He was the closest factor we needed to an actual mountaineer—and, along with his beard grown bushy and his glacier goggles strapped on, he regarded it. Rob mentioned that he would climb Ojos with out the assistance of altitude-simulation tents or medication resembling Diamox, a capsule that may stop some signs of altitude illness. This had been his place—which I had adopted, too—after we climbed the Mexican volcano a couple of years earlier. “I’m not taking any tablets to bypass Mom Nature,” Rob had mentioned. “If I can’t deal with the altitude, then I’m not meant to climb the mountain, and I’ll flip round.” He felt the identical about Ojos. “You suppose Messner used painkillers?” Rob requested.Reinhold Messner, the climbing nice from South Tyrol, Italy, was the primary human to prime Mt. Everest solo, one of many first two to summit Everest with out supplemental oxygen, and is well known as the primary to finally climb all fourteen of the world’s eight-thousand-metre peaks this fashion—an achievement akin to breaking the four-minute mile. In his late twenties, in 1971, Messner revealed what would turn into a canonical mountaineering essay, “Homicide of the Not possible.” He condemned shortcuts and, in so doing, distilled the “By Truthful Means” philosophy he’d adopted from earlier climbers: “Put in your boots and get going. If you happen to’ve obtained a companion, take a rope with you and a few pitons on your belays, however nothing else. I’m already on my approach, prepared for something—even for retreat, if I meet the unimaginable.” In 1985, the director Werner Herzog launched “The Darkish Glow of the Mountains,” a documentary about Messner’s unprecedented climb of Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II, two neighboring eight-thousand-metre peaks close to China. Messner and a younger climbing associate, Hans Kammerlander, used no supplemental oxygen and no porters after departing base camp throughout their week-long traverse of the peaks, which they climbed in succession. (Upon encountering Herzog’s digicam once more, after every week within the clouds, Kammerlander says, “I feel if you happen to do one thing like that always, then one of the best factor you are able to do is sit down and write your will.”) Herzog resists making a hero out of Messner, who can appear topic to a darkly fatalistic drive. “I can’t reply the query of why I do it, simply as I can’t say why I reside,” Messner tells Herzog. “And I by no means requested myself the query once I was climbing. The query simply doesn’t exist then, as a result of my total being is the reply.” Messner’s identify would come up repeatedly on Ojos, as a shorthand for both the pure or the inadvisable strategy to our expedition.