What It’s Like to Get Really, Really High

Ojos del Salado rises more than twenty-two thousand feet above sea level, on Chile’s northeastern border. It is 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 size, if not renown. Its name means “sources of the salty river,” or, possibly, “eyes of salt,” which is what the brackish lagoons on its lower reaches resemble when your brain is starved of oxygen. The wind and cold are trouble, too. Hypothermia and high-altitude pulmonary edema invisibly patrol the peak, which a pair of Poles were the first to reach, in 1937. Nonetheless, Ojos is what mountaineers call a “walk-up.” There are no crevasses or technical features on its standard route, just a relatively simple rock scramble beneath the summit block.

I gathered this much from reading trip reports, back in 2016, while planning an Ojos expedition of my own. One particularly memorable account of failure there described temperatures of twenty degrees below zero and winds that drove “head-high icy particles which cut our faces like sandpaper.” At the time I encountered that chilling sentence, I was a thirty-five-year-old freelance writer living in Atlanta. When asked why I wanted to climb this volcano—rather than a slighter one, or maybe a ski hill—I sometimes lazily cited George Mallory. “Because it’s there,” the English mountaineering legend said, before one of his pioneering attempts at Mt. Everest, where he would die in 1924.

I did not want to die. I just wanted to kick my tires a bit, to let nature throttle me again. When I was twenty-one and meandering through college, I completed a two-thousand-mile hike of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. After four and a half months, I emerged emaciated, emboldened, and in need of a root canal from my daily Snickers dipped in Nutella. A few years later, I traced a two-hundred-mile loop through the mountains encircling Lake Tahoe, wearing a silver Speedo urged upon me by my younger brother, Rob, who donned a floral number. I bagged a bunch of fourteen-thousand-foot peaks out West, while working for Outside magazine, and I even topped an eighteener, the Pico de Orizaba volcano, in Mexico, on a newspaper assignment. Climbing that one with Rob had entailed just a few days of discomfort, though. A properly acclimatized expedition up Ojos would require living above fourteen thousand feet for a week, including at least one night past nineteen thousand—two-thirds the cruising altitude of a commercial airplane—where there is approximately half as much oxygen as you enjoy at sea level.

Three friends and my brother agreed that Ojos offered a “Type 2 Adventure.” That is, a perversely painful undertaking that we would fondly remember forever. Hundreds of planning e-mails followed. It wasn’t enough to merely climb the volcano: we had decided to bring along mountain bikes. Only a few other humans had apparently done so. Why not “catch a small plane into the mountain region, unload our equipment, ride into the mountain, summit that beast, ride down and out. . . . Would be so sick!” Chris, a lawyer at the time, who became our fantasist-in-chief, wrote. Justin, a commercial photographer, had never been much higher than fourteen thousand feet, but he was a strong and dependable cyclist. Doug, a fastidious videographer, who planned to bring along his drone, was also inexperienced at elevation; to train for the trip, he slept, often joined by his wife, inside an altitude-simulation tent for two weeks. “She’s cranky this morning and not happy after our first full night at 10,000,” he told us at one point.

Rob was by then a junior-high-school English teacher in San Diego. He had graduated from the National Outdoor Leadership School, and had survived multiple summers climbing and slacklining around Yosemite Valley, where, in keeping with his aversion to constraints, he frequently “raged off-trail.” He was also the only one of us who had ever climbed above twenty thousand feet: on Chimborazo, in Ecuador, and Stok Kangri, in India. He was the closest thing we had to a real mountaineer—and, with his beard grown bushy and his glacier goggles strapped on, he looked it. Rob said that he would climb Ojos without the help of altitude-simulation tents or drugs such as Diamox, a pill that can prevent some symptoms of altitude sickness. This had been his position—which I had adopted, too—when we climbed the Mexican volcano a few years earlier. “I’m not taking any pills to circumvent Mother Nature,” Rob had said. “If I can’t handle the altitude, then I’m not meant to climb the mountain, and I’ll turn around.” He felt the same about Ojos. “You think Messner used painkillers?” Rob asked.

Reinhold Messner, the climbing great from South Tyrol, Italy, was the first human to top Mt. Everest solo, one of the first two to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen, and is widely recognized as the first to eventually climb all fourteen of the world’s eight-thousand-metre peaks this way—an achievement akin to breaking the four-minute mile. In his late twenties, in 1971, Messner published what would become a canonical mountaineering essay, “Murder of the Impossible.” He condemned shortcuts and, in so doing, distilled the “By Fair Means” philosophy he’d adopted from earlier climbers: “Put on your boots and get going. If you’ve got a companion, take a rope with you and a couple of pitons for your belays, but nothing else. I’m already on my way, ready for anything—even for retreat, if I meet the impossible.” In 1985, the director Werner Herzog released “The Dark Glow of the Mountains,” a documentary about Messner’s unprecedented climb of Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II, two neighboring eight-thousand-metre peaks near China. Messner and a young climbing partner, Hans Kammerlander, used no supplemental oxygen and no porters after departing base camp during their week-long traverse of the peaks, which they climbed in succession. (Upon encountering Herzog’s camera again, after a week in the clouds, Kammerlander says, “I think if you do something like that often, then the best thing you can do is sit down and write your will.”) Herzog resists making a hero out of Messner, who can seem subject to a darkly fatalistic drive. “I can’t answer the question of why I do it, just as I can’t say why I live,” Messner tells Herzog. “And I never asked myself the question when I was climbing. The question just doesn’t exist then, because my entire being is the answer.” Messner’s name would come up repeatedly on Ojos, as a shorthand for either the pure or the inadvisable approach to our expedition.