Week 32 - Vertical Endeavors of a Mediocre Mountain Man

I came back into the tent after peeing off the side of the mountain. The rainy haze-infected darkness gave me more privacy than I get inside my bathroom in San Se.

“Is it 3:45 yet?” Alicia asked me groggily as I began to unzip the tent flap. The timbre of her voice suggested that she hadn’t actually been sleeping.

I checked my phone, the luminescent numbers uncomfortably bright to my unadjusted eyes. “No, it’s not quite midnight.”

“Damn it.”

It’s a rare occurrence when an alarm goes off well before dawn and it’s met with an enthusiastic response, and yet when the hour finally came there was no complaining, no attempts to hide from the world for a few minutes more; rather, it was received with a collective sigh of relief.

The seven of us crawled out of our sleeping bags, donned our warmest clothes, and set about getting ready to summit the highest peak in Central America. We were on the Tajumulco Volcano, 13,000 feet above sea level, and within an hour’s climb of the top.

Still, the trek it had taken to get to this point was far from luxurious. Most of us had suffered almost 7 hours using camionetas and a single, absurdly overladen taxi to get to the base of the mountain. More than that, we had endured 4 intense, though enjoyable, hours of climbing overgrown goat paths and bushwhacking before we reached what would become our base camp.

As we began to set up our tents, a four-person and a two-person (that would ultimately be stretched accommodate 3 of us), we noticed crucial items were missing: We had no rain flies and, in the case of the smaller tent, no poles. There was little we could do about the rain protection other than hold our breath that canícula (essentially, a week-long drought in the middle of rainy season) would hold out. It didn’t, and parking ourselves in the middle of the cloud layer would prove to be a poor choice. The smaller tent was held aloft by the reappropriated drawstring to a backpack tied to a low lying tree branch. It wasn’t great, but it kept everything roughly triangular.

The rain began pouring shortly after we finished our unheated dinner of beans, corn, and tortillas. A fire would have been a welcome comfort, but the dampness from the omnipresent clouds made keeping one lit unsustainable. We retired to our tents by 6:30, though the cramped quarters, growing puddles, and impending altitude sickness made sleeping next to impossible. Every time I was able to get my nausea and racing heart rate under control enough to doze off, a new source of water or rustling from an equally uncomfortable companion would awaken me.

And so, when 3:45 hit, it was a relief rather than an onus. Finally we could quit this tiresome charade of sleeping and set out to do what we had intended.

The temperature had dropped since we had gone to bed, and now hovered in the low 40’s. The beams from our headlamps were reflected off the moisture in the hyper-saturated air, showing not just the surface the light hit but, like lasers, the linear path it took from its source. We laced up our boots, donned our outer layers, and wrapped our sleeping bags around ourselves in one final, desperate attempt to stymie the seeping cold.

Our goal was to make it to the summit before dawn, so that we could watch the birth of the new morning in complete detail. We set off just after 4:00, initially playing leapfrog with a crew of tourists and their surly guides before outpacing them midway up the trail.

The way was difficult, certainly far more so than at any point earlier in the climb. Where our route had initially been fairly obvious and gentle, we now had a path that led over loose, irregular boulders, made all the more treacherous by the rain and darkness. A single misstep meant a broken bone or worse. We trod carefully upwards, sometimes just a step or two away from the void.

The oxygen deprivation and gale-force winds, relentlessly increasing since we left base camp, peaked on the unprotected final two hundred meters. The slope was such that I could only see a few dozen meters at a time, and each time it made me think that the end was at hand. If I just trudged a few steps farther, I would be at the summit. Then I would reach that point and see it continued for a few more steps. By the fifth such disappointment it was getting difficult to convince myself that I was making any real progress.

And yet, like everything, the mountain too came to an end. With a final push I slipped over the lip of the mountain and found myself standing on a relatively flat natural platform of rock, 13,845 feet above sea level. The wind, stronger than any I have experienced, whipped at the sleeping bag draped across my shoulders, making it look more like a biblical robe than a sodden piece of synthetic fabric. I held on to it tightly; if I let go for even a second, it would literally blow off the mountain.

We had beaten the sunrise by more than a half an hour, so we sat amongst the boulders, doing our best to shield ourselves from the relentless onslaught of the elements. We had risen above the clouds, and thus most of the wetness, but the cold was exponentially worse. We huddled against each other inside our sleeping bags, voicing an expletive every now and again, as if the forcefulness of the word could warm our bodies.

When the sun began to rise, it was hard not to gasp. The discomfort went away—within reason—and was replaced by the sheer thrill of adventure. It felt like we were standing on the roof of the world, all other peaks preferring to bow in meek deference to our majesty. To walk from one side of the summit to the other took only a few seconds, but the views could not have been more different. The clouds that had made our night so miserable were spread out to the east of us like a roiling sea, so dense that it dared us to walk across. On the western slope the moon was still visible, the terrain bathed in blue gradients. We could see for dozens—perhaps hundreds—of miles in every direction.

I was alive, and the cold and the muscle aches were a small price to pay for that feeling.

The photos are truly amazing. Check them out at https://picasaweb.google.com/114291229338134891582/Week32?authkey=Gv1sRgCL6t39KixJXJwgE