Chimbo Climb: “Lower Summit”

Veintimilla. Higher than Denali. A Fantastically Brutal Day.

The snow surface is Goldilocks good—firm enough that we’re not burning energy breaking trail (or flirting with avalanche terrain), soft enough that we’re not skating on hard ice. Just enough grip to allow more switchbacks to eat into this mountain’s infinite steepness. Perfect for long, forgiving switchbacks that chew into this mountain’s infinite steepness. In dry conditions, you go straight up the icy slope in an endless French step. But with tonight’s conditions, luck is briefly on our side.

We plan to leave at 11pm, but another group at high camp claims that spot, so we target midnight.

Ossy wakes us and I’m instantly amped and anxious. We shuffle down to the kitchen dome for coca tea and a light snack. The man and young girl in that tent appear genuinely sleepless—always boiling water, always cooking, an around-the-clock hustle that becomes its own small inspiration for what’s ahead.

As we wait, a quiet tension fills the dome. Not fear, exactly—more like the deep attention your body pays to the fact that it’s very dark, very cold, and you’re very awake. I manufacture a smile for Ossy to signal I’m fine. Maybe mostly true.

Without Jeff, we are a group of five: Pablo leading Paul and Mengezi, and Ossy leading me. It’s 12:15am when we light up and start on the scree. It feels like no time before we hit the glacier and strap on crampons.

I hadn’t said much to Ossy about our challenges with Ivan on Coto—partly because I prefer to whine like a princess on this blog instead, and partly because I didn’t want to leave the misimpression that it wasn’t a glorious day. But my mantra today is pole-pole, or “ slowly, slowly” — the Swahili words behind our success on Kili. Ossy doesn’t need guidance from me, of course. He has been watching each us these past two weeks; he knows our limits better than we do.

Early on the glacier, I search for my rhythm. Stay out of the red. Keep your heart rate down. Find your cadence. My friend Trent once described drummers as either “feelers” or “counters.” Feelers ride the rhythm; counters calculate it. In mountaineering, I am a counter. At first, I am partial to a waltz: step on three and rest on one and two. I imagine dancing with my wife, to a step I think we have done maybe once (at a New Orleans wedding nearly twenty years ago), but in my mind we are skilled and elegant. As I get higher, my heart rate drives a faster cadence, and I count three, four, or five rests between strides. A slow, gasping Viennese death-dance.

But still, I feel decent. Ossy quietly calibrates our pace without a word. If I lag, he senses the tightening rope and slows half a beat. If I speed up too much and the rope slackens between us—oh wait—that never once happens.

My mind drifts with the snow. Sometimes I latch onto a song and try to use it to find my cadence. Sometimes that song lingers, haunts, and underscores the eternity of the moment. At worse times, I summon something more demoralizing—questions why I am here and doing this, doubts I have never had about this trip or about this place and this moment. I feel the energy emptiness, the riding on fumes, of bonking, and I know I need to eat. But on this steep face, rest stops are spaced at least an hour apart, and eating requires effort more than instinct.

I plant the shaft-end of my axe for uphill balance, and nearly always it hits hard snow or ice to provide a stiff anchor for a third point of balance. But on occasion, the spike pierces all the way through an airy pocket without giving the expected support, and I stumble over and shoot out a downhill leg as a counterbalance, rendering me, on that odd step, better off without the damned tool. Stay out of the red. Find your cadence.

Four hours in, my hands are getting cold. At the next break, I switch out midweights for the massive overmitts, trading any semblance of dexterity for warmth. Seeing flailing paws, Ossy clip my backpack straps for me. I might have been ashamed of this coddling a couple hours ago. Now I’ll have the lot.

Chimbo is so relentlessly steep that flat spots for breaks don’t exist. Ossy and Pablo carve out small ice benches—little frost caves—for us to sit in. I think Ossy digs three or four for me alone.

Two hours before sunrise, the heavy snow comes. Periodically I catch a glimpse of the headlamps above. Sometimes the distant ones reveal a pitch so steep that I entertain the thought that they are just stars.

Somewhere around 19,000 feet—an altitude I handled fine in Tanzania—the hammer falls. I’m dizzy, constantly short of breath, coordination fraying at the edges. I ask Ossy for periodic one-minute rests to reel myself back in. He never once shows disapproval.

Sometimes a step in the steep snow slides and sends a foot’s hard effort crumbling back to where it started. Ideal conditions or not, it occasionally feels like climbing in sand.

Chimbo litters DNF’s across its face like gore-tex confetti. Some climbers came down early, while it is still dark. Others lug their agony a bit farther. About 1k feet from the summit, we pass an American team sprawled out on the side of the trail. It is the same team we saw at Coto—the guys who went up Heartbreak Ridge and were the first team to the summit that day. I overhear one climber tell his team he is cooked, done. Either feeling the same or processing the implications for their own chances, no one else says a word. Ossy says later that this group turned around and failed to summit.

As we approach the summit, I don’t look too far uphill, trying to avoid the fatigue-exaggerated disappointment of discovering a false summit. Imperceptibly gradually, the predawn light begins to lift the shadows. The wind picks up where the slope eases off. I see groups of climbers huddled ahead, and I allow the thought that the summit is near. We haven’t yet donned glacier glasses, and Ossy shouts to keep my head down, protected by my hood, so the crosswind snow doesn’t sandblast my corneas.

As I plod along the last hundred yards, Ossy turns a camera on me, and I pump my arms in a tired celebration, something between victory and delirium. His smile shows what no one ever doubted: even in these miserable conditions, Ossy is perfectly at home here, happy, in total control. And without him, I would not be getting anywhere near a summit today.

Normally, Ossy’s teams would traverse 30 minutes from Ventamilla, the “lower summit” at 20.44k feet, to the true summit at 20.55k feet. Due to high winds and heavy snow, there is no safe way to hit the real summit today. We would’ve had to navigate by accurate GPS (spellcheck changed that phrase to “accurate god”) because visibility is so poor. When Ossy tells me we are heading down, I am 99-percent relieved, where the 1 percent is the deeply-shrunken part that told Jeff yesterday that there’s no such thing as a “lower summit.”

The wind dies dramatically as we scramble off the top. I stumble downhill like a drunken newborn. Ossy has me on a short leash. I can sense Ossy’s attention is peaked and focused. He knows I’m cooked. He knows that if I fall, we fall.

We fall behind the other Mountain Madness team, but we make out their little dots downslope. I stagger on, and Ossy pays out just enough line to keep his fish safely on hook. No sniper would have a chance hitting this unintentionally serpentine target.

Under 19k feet, my lungs and senses return in the relatively thick air. That’s right, the air feels thick to me at 18-plus thousand feet! The suddenness of the change is amazing. The other team has been waiting, and we soon catch up. We get to an easy down scramble, and this is actually fun again. Among other options, you can front-point down this scramble. Fearing he is still helping down a man-sized boneless chicken, Ossy keeps a super-tight belay and wraps the rope around a large rock for additional support. I try to let him know I am good again by making precise kick steps. Less than 30 minutes later, we take off our crampons and quickly hike the rest of the way to high-camp.

It is still snowing steadily, and no one wants to linger outside. We cram into our dome tent and begin packing. Everything is damp or worse, but we are done with all this gear in Ecuador (except for another hour down-hike to the parking lot).

Back in the kitchen dome, one climber is in gastrointestinal despair. The poop box—essentially a rectangular insult to human dignity—has defeated his courage. His plan B: sprint an hour down the mountain to the lower hut for a superior toilet. Sanity intervenes.

We tromp to the parking lot, load the bus with dripping gear, grab pizza en route, and roll into Rumiloma by 5 p.m. I’m annihilated but rally for farewell ales with Paul and Mengezi. Tomorrow Jeff and I have one last free day in Quito.