Coto Summit

Off to the Donkey Races

With a full crowd planning to climb, it is not surprising that the hut is loud at 6:30pm—our official bedtime for a night start. I put in my ear buds, listen to a podcast, and try to rest. I may even get an hour of sleep, which is an hour more than expected.

At 10pm, the guides wake the early group—Carl, Santi, and Mengezi—for an 11pm departure. My group is scheduled an hour behind. But once the early crew is rousted, I’m up for good. I stay in my bag long enough to let them clear out, then wander downstairs for coca tea and a breakfast consisting of a roll with butter and four Chips Ahoy. At 11pm, when our guides wake everyone else, I head back to the bunk room and prep my gear. Unlike Cayambe, it’s glorious to have enough time to prepare and over-prepare. I’m ready at least fifteen minutes early.

We are eight climbers plus four guides—a full train—and somehow we set out only five minutes late. The weather is stunningly cooperative: mild temps, trace snow, almost no wind. Our headlamp caravan pulls out of the station up the main route.

For the first hour and a half, we switchback up scree that is mercifully firm most of the time, though the occasional patch of loose volcanic sand steals vertical feet we had just purchased at great metabolic cost. I find a rhythm and feel good.

Then we hit the glacier, and everything changes.. Our train decouples so that each rope team can go at its own speed. The first warning sign is Ivan’s tone—urgent, clipped, unmistakably “let’s go”—as he tells Jeff and me to get our crampons on quickly. After a very brisk inspection of our work, he hands us our packs, ropes us up, and sends us off as the first team onto the glacier.

Ivan takes the lead, Garrett in the middle (thank god), me in back.

This is insane. Several of our MM teams have consistently been faster than us, and the Young Bucks—Paul, literally younger than my beer belly, and Brian, only slightly older—are an entirely different species of fitness. Yet here we are, forced into the lead. I suggest to Ivan for the first of a dozen times that we should let the faster teams pass. He dismisses this with a breezy “They will pass if they need.”

Fifteen minutes later on steep ice, I point out that our pace is too fast. I am at 80–90% of max heart rate and we have nine hours to go. We need to pace ourselves and conserve energy. Oh how I missed the steady, reassuring chant—pole, pole—of our lovely and humane Tanzania guides on Kilimanjaro.

In response to our gasping pleas for moderation, Ivan variously feigns agreement, dodges, ignores or dissembles. “¡Jeff, we won’t go faster: we can keep this same pace and we will just make longer strides, Jeff!” Ivan begins incorporating my friend’s name into the complementary inverted punctuation marks that packetize his Spanish-accented commands. “¡Jeff, you cannot pause to drink here in the trail; we will block others Jeff!” “¡Jeff, the rope must be on the other side Jeff!” “¿Jeff, why are you walking with little penguin steps, Jeff?”

For Ivan, rest breaks are free to promise and very expensive to deliver. We will take a break soon, in five minutes, only five more minutes, he would baldly lie. Halfway up the ascent, we have our second break. Ivan commands his conscripts to put on their large puffy coats so we don’t get cold as we sit and recover. Usually this is good advice, but there is zero wind, and I am warm. I say no, I’m ok like this. (I don’t point out that our breaks are too short for anyone to get cold.). Incensed by my insubordination, Ivan demands I put my coat on now. With words and tone foreshadowing revolution, I say that it’s not going to happen, I know my body, and I’m fine.

Driven into the red repeatedly at this point, Jeff and I are both dizzy. Jeff’s boat-sized feet keep bungling onto the rope whenever slack enough to touch the ground. Armed with sharp crampons, boots on rope is a safety no-no which draws Ivan’s instant rage. “¡Jeff, sit on your pack Jeff!” My friend tries to comply but in this oxygen and compassion-deprived environment, he bowls backwards over his pack. Rather than a helping hand, Ivan offers “¡Jeff, no more beers for you Jeff!” and laughs at his own joke. Just then the Young Bucks pass us, and Ivan says the break is over. Turns out that other teams are eyeing their own break spot immediately uphill from us, so when Ivan mushes us back up trail, we are again in the lead of this delusional race of the unwitting and unwilling.

I should point out that Ivan is an insanely talented mountaineer and, no doubt, a spectacular guide for more experienced clients, or those seeking personal records. If he had guided the Young Bucks, they would have summitted two hours before dawn. But don’t confuse Ivan’s determination with purpose, because the latter is as thin as the air. There is no weather window to make, we have no turn-around time to hit, and we are way ahead of schedule. Our speed-without-need actually undermines our summit chances and increases our risk.

The pitch of the trail is relentless, exceeding 50 percent at times and almost never dropping below 40. I try to find a rhythm below aortic combustion. Step, one, two, three, four, Step, one, two, three, four, Step. I test inserting a “five” in the rest count, but the rope goes tight, and I receive a corrective yank on my leash.

The Young Bucks catch up, and we think we overhear their guide say we are at 19k feet, which would mean only 300 feet left to the summit. Jeff flirts with this small offering of hope and asks Ivan to confirm. Ivan quickly squashes this fleeting optimism with his own confident and 100-percent-incorrect assessment: “¡Jeff, it is at least 200 meters more Jeff!”

On the last stretch, I beg for brief, standing breaks. Ideally you are more efficient if you continue at a steady pace and avoid full stops. But slowing is no option, so my self-preservation instinct improvises. At one of these stops, the Young Bucks pass. My incapacitated senses detect no reaction from Ivan. Maybe he knows he has whipped his mules as hard as he could. Maybe he savors a moment of quiet disgust.

Seconds later we limp along. We hit a section that is less steep, but which trades us uneven, frozen dirt and rock for the relatively easy purchase of ice and snow. This makes it extremely difficult to find grip with the crampons and forces concentration from brain-fruit long squeezed dry. Past that stretch, the soft ice returns, the slope flattens further, and we realize we are approaching the summit. We join in spirited celebration with the Young Bucks, throwing unlanded haymaker high-fives, exchanging enthusiastic hugs otherwise unwarranted by our two-day acquaintance, and snapping countless photographs.

Looking at my watch, I realize we summit in 6 hours and 20 something minutes — well over an hour faster than Ossy plans for us.

Next we welcome Carlos and Mengezi, led by Ossy.

And Team Katie and Erica, led by Pablo.

Ivan tells us to get ready to descend. But Ossy has us wait so we can get a large-group photo. Alex comes next and takes a quiet moment to thank his boots.

The struggle is over, and we make it. Only a leisurely walk down, right? Nonsense. Ivan yokes his team and off we fly. Going downhill, our positions are reversed. I’m in front, Jeff in the middle, and Ivan in back. We mush off in a purposeless hurry, bounding down slopes that we had penguin-stepped up.

Within minutes we reach a massive crevasse—something we entirely missed in the dark on the ascent. I stop for photographs, wanting to capture tangible evidence of the voids we had only sensed by intuition and terror hours earlier.

On the ascent, my friend’s name becomes part of Ivan’s complementary punctuation; on the descent, my name becomes an anchor point for Ivan’s word-unit palindromes from hell. “Move left, David, Left. Move!” “More straight, David, Straight more.” “Please. Faster, David. Faster please.” My mutinous impulses ask Ivan if he is lost. He says no, but that the thick cloud cover caused him to leave the main trail too soon. Spotting various large, dark shapes sharking under the snow downslope, I ask “You’re not taking us into some crevasse field are you?” “No, certainly, David, certainly no.”

Just then, prompted by either my question or my unsatisfactory pace, Ivan flips the order of the rope team and takes over the lead. He immediately accelerates our descent, and the rope snaps and yanks me to my knees, on which I slide for a few yards before coming to a stop. “C’mon, David, c’mon.” As I recover, Ivan tacks steeply left — oh hell no, what are you doing, you can’t be serious — and takes us UPHILL. Truthfully it is only maybe 25 yards uphill, but it feels like a mile. An extracurricular mile.

Around the small knob — our second summit, this time without the high fives and photos — we flip our rope team back and Ivan orders me back on point. “More right, David, right more.” “¿Jeff, what are you doing Jeff?” “The line, there, David, there, the line.” Ivan keeps referring to some line. I look uphill for more clues, and see only wild waving of his ice axe in the generally downhill direction. “Go there, the line, David, the line, go there.” What the hell is this line? I see a line in the snow there. A line in the rocks over there. I feel a line in the sand that your bitch-ass is dancing around. What fucking line??? “There, don’t you see, David, don’t you see, there?” Wait what, you mean the “line” is the fucking trail right there? “The trail??? Why didn’t you just say trail!!!” “Oh yeah, trail, David, trail, oh yeah.”

No longer lost and leading his burros through a crevasse field, Ivan’s tone becomes positive — if hollow, given the past 8 hours. “Super, guys, super! We are almost there now.” The sun is intense, reflecting off the snow, and I am grilled. I tell Ivan I’m going to stop and strip a layer. For no known or knowable reason, Ivan demands I wait and do this when we stop to take off our crampons. “Wait, no, David, no. Wait.” I ignore his emphatic pleas, and quickly shed a layer before he has time to realize he has lost control of his team for good.

A half-hour later, we merge back into the main trail and find ourselves exactly the same ten yards behind the Young Bucks that we were before our “shortcut.” I wonder if Ivan feels he has lost his imaginary race. Maybe the guides have a side bet on who will summit and return first, and Ivan refuses to let his unlucky draw of two over-the-hill novices count him out. If there is no prize for second place, I hope Ivan takes solace in the fact that he drove us as fast as we could possibly go without Jeff and I cutting his rope and tossing him into a bottomless crevasse. Shaking hands with Ivan in an act that meant “end” more than “victory,” we stagger into the climbers’ hut and let the gear ooze off our wobbly frames. We eat breakfast as we wait for the other teams. Ivan walks over and eyes Jeff’s plate. “¡Jeff, you must eat your fruits, Jeff!” Jeff looks at me, laughs, and pushes away his plate. This is a truly fantastic day.