What is like you really get, really high

Ojos Del Saldo rises more than 22,000 feet above sea level, on the northeastern border of Chile. It is the longest volcano in the world, and it is tall on the highest desert in the world: a giant ash and a durable that exceeds the size, and Denali in size, if not famous. His name means “sources of the salty river”, or, perhaps, “eyes of salt”, which is similar to the inverted lakes in its lower arrival when your mind comes out of oxygen. Wind and cold is also a problem. Low body temperature and high -rise pulmonary edema with invisible patrols in the peak, which was a pair of Polish first to arrive, in 1937. There are no cracks or technical features on its standard way, but rather a relatively simple rocky scramble under the summit block.

I collected a lot of reading reports, in 2016, while planning my OJOS exploratory. An unforgettable one account Failure there described the temperatures of 20 degrees less than zero and wind that pushed “high -headed ice molecules that cut our faces like sanding paper.” As you faced the frightening prison sentence, I was a thirty -five -year -old independent writer living in Atlanta. When I was asked why I wanted to climb this volcano – more than just creativity, or perhaps the ski hill – sometimes George Malory was martyred. “Because there is there,” said the legend of climbing the English mountains, before one of his pioneering attempts on Mount Everest, where he will die in 1924.

I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to kick my tires a little, to let the nature worry me again. When I was twenty -one years old and I was zag through the college, I completed a distance of 200 miles from the path of Apalashian from Georgia to Min. Four and a half months later, I got out of the humiliation, encouraged, and I needed the root channel from the daily Snickers that decreased in Nutella. After a few years, I followed the episode of a hundred miles across the mountains that surround Lake TahoeWear silver Speedo urged me by my younger brother, Rob, who wore the flower number. I got a group of fourteen thousand feet in the West, while working for it Outside Magazine, up to eighteen, Beco de Orizaba volcano, in Mexico, in a newspaper Assignment. Climbing this with Rob necessitated a few days of discomfort. An expected campaign will properly require Augus to live over fourteen thousand feet for a week, including at least one night at nineteen thousand-thirds of the wandering height of the commercial plane-where there are approximately half of the oxygen that you enjoy at sea level.

Three friends and brother agreed that OJOS offered a “type 2 adventure”. That is, a great painful task that we will remember it with pride forever. Hundreds of emails planning. Not only was the volcano climbing: We decided to bring mountain bicycles. only A few last Humans seem to have done so. Why not “hunt a small plane in the mountain area, empty our equipment, ride it to the mountain, top this monster, ride down and out … it will be very sick!” Chris, a lawyer, wrote at the time, who became our president. Justin, a commercial photographer, was not much higher than fourteen thousand feet, but he was a strong and reliable passenger. Dog, a quick video photographer, was planning to bring drones, inexperienced in height; For training in the trip, he was sleeping, and his wife often joined him, inside the altitude simulation tent for two weeks. He told us at some point: “It is strange this morning and not happy after the first full night in 10,000.”

By time, Rob was an English teacher at the beginner school in San Diego. He had graduated from the outdoor national leadership school, and had survived the multiple summer to climb and retreat around the Yosemite Valley, where, in line with his hatred of restrictions, often “left the path”. He was also the only one who had ever ascended more than twenty thousand feet: in Chimborazo, in Ecuador, and Stoke Kangri, in India. It was the closest thing we had on the real mountain climber – and with its growing density and its tied ice glasses, looked at it. Rob said that he will boil OJOS without the help of height simulation tents or medications such as Diamox, a pill that can prevent some symptoms of height disease. This was his position – which he also adopted – when we went up the Mexican volcano a few years ago. “I do not take any birth control pills to circumvent the nature of the mother,” Rob said. “If I cannot deal with height, I do not mean to climb the mountain, and I will turn.” He felt the same about Ojos. “Do you think Messenger used pain relievers?” Rob request.

Renehld Misser, a great climbing from South Terrol, Italy, was the first man to the highest mountain of Everest Solo, one of the first two to the summit of Everest without additional oxygen, and is widely recognized as the first to eventually ascend the fourteen of the peak in the world eight thousand meters in the world in this way-a bleak achievement to break the style. In his late twenties, in 1971, Messenger published what would be legal Mountain climbing article“Kill the impossible.” He condemned shortcuts, and thus, he distilled the philosophy of “fair means” that you adopt from the former climbers: “Wear your shoes and go. The documentary About Messner climbing unprecedented for Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II, which are eight thousand meters near China. Hans Kammarider, a young climbing partner, did not use the additional oxygen and does not carry the porters after leaving the Al -Qaeda camp while passing a week of the peaks, which you climbed respectively. (When having a Herzog camera again, after a week of clouds, Kammerand says, “I think that if you are doing something like this often, the best thing you can do is sit and write your will.” “I cannot answer the question about the reason I do so, just as I cannot say why I live,” Misser Herzog told me. ”I never asked myself when I was climbing. Fullly the answer. “The name Messner will come again and again on OJOS, as a reduction to the pure or healing approach to our mission.