Aconcagua, The Stone Sentinel Essay, Research Paper

Aconcagua, the Stone Sentinel

Every muscle in my body seemed to relax as I rested for the first time in what felt like a week. It had only been six hours though, and we were only at base camp, 14,800 feet above sea level. As my head pounded, probably because of the altitude, I had a disturbing thought. We still had almost eight thousand vertical feet to climb until the summit. Thinking of this, my heart sank. How could I make it if I felt this bad already? My head was throbbing, the mere thought of food disgusted me, and my legs were Jell-O. However, as I sank into my sleeping bag I was filled with the peace of the near dream state I was in. Maybe I could make it; I could summit Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas.

After months of preparation and seeming a week of travel, it was a relief when we finally began hiking. Now it was all up to me. The plane had not crashed. The vans that brought us to the trailhead had not careened off the winding mountain roads. Surrounded by beautiful country, my only concern was putting one foot in front of the other. Soon the first day was over. My legs felt it a little, but it felt good to know that we were that much closer to our goal and still feeling strong. The next few days would be much different.

As we followed the river that would eventually lead us to base camp, the trail became less and less fun. The rocks that had once been easy to avoid now jumped at my feet. Hills that had once been scaled almost without a thought now made my heart race as if I had just finished a marathon. By the end of the third day, and thirty miles from the trailhead, we had finally made it to Base Camp.

Base Camp was almost a mini city. Despite the fact that we were on the less traveled side of the mountain, there were still about ten different expeditions and forty tents. It was an oddity in an otherwise wilderness area. If you did not like the food in our enormous mess tent, you could always get a hamburger and beer at Grajales .

As I awoke from my first night in Base Camp, I was amazed by how warm the tent was. My father, much more of a morning person than I was long gone, and the interior of the tent must have been seventy-five degrees. It was one in the afternoon. Since I went to bed right after dinner, I had slept for about seventeen hours. My headache was gone, I was warm and today I had no obligations but to rest, which I am rather talented in.

During breakfast, if you can call it that, my pulse and blood oxygen levels were tested. They were better than the previous night, but still not as good as the rest of the group, a cause for growing concern for me. The scary thing was, there was nothing that I could do about it. Everyone s body acclimatizes to altitude differently. Was mine just not going to do it? Young people generally have a tougher time acclimatizing than their elders do. Could this hold me back?

The rest of the day was not quite as depressing. Another group had just returned from high on the mountain. They looked as if they were walking dead. Their faces were tanned to the point where there was distinct line where the sunglasses had ended on their upper cheek. It appeared that it took every ounce of the their strength to keep their eyes open, not to mention hike with a fifty pound pack. Tents were put up in the quickest possible way and in a manner as if this altitude was nothing to fear. I m not even sure if they ate dinner or dove directly into their sleeping bags. Only the guide joined us that night. Most had made the summit he said, some hadn t. Would I be one of the some that would make it or would I be turned back or even worse, quit?

There was so much pressure on me to summit, too much. A horrible belief held by many is that if you don t summit the trip was not successful. Although I knew better, I wanted more than anything to summit. My whole school was keeping track of me on the Internet, my girlfriend, my family members would make me tell the story countless times, even if it was a bad one. This determination to summit that I was developing was not a good thing as one often thinks of determination. Single-mindedness like this could and has killed many people. They push themselves to the summit, and then have nothing left to get back.

Aconcagua was not a walk in the park either. Annually there are more deaths on Aconcagua than Everest, sixteen the year that I was there. Four climbers had died less than a week before we got there. High altitude and the resulting lack of oxygen has numerous detrimental effects on the body. It causes headache and shortness of breath in almost all cases. Decision-making can be impaired, and there is even a chance of High Altitude Pulmonary or Cerebral Edema, both life threatening. Besides the altitude, the winds on Aconcagua are practically famous.

To help with acclimatization, the body needs all kinds of fluids so we were instructed to drink about a gallon of water a day. You can only guess how many times we had to stop along the trail to relieve ourselves. With ten guys, we quickly went from stepping about fifty feet off the trail to five, writing our names for all those who followed to see. We were forced to keep our pee, Clear and copious, and that is what we did.

Going number two was a far less enjoyable experience. At base camp there was one bathroom, if you can call it that. Basically, it was a hole in the ground. There were cloth walls with some unfortunately placed tears from the time it had been blown over in a windstorm the week before. There was no ceiling, and those of us that were taller had the enjoyable experience of being a head taller than the top when we stood up. With the bathroom stationed right off the trail in the middle of base camp, this situation could have made me uncomfortable in more civilized situations. However, on the mountain, in clothes I had not changed in a week and didn t plan to for the next two, I found myself just telling those who passed by, Hi, nice day huh?

The thought that had stayed me through the previous meals was that food would get better at base camp. At the time, it was a vast improvement, but given the choice, I would choose my wonderful Mother s worst meal over the coveted cheese ravioli. The tasteless soup, gritty pasta, and odd casserole type things were not all that bad. To tell you the truth though, I was expecting worse.

Unfortunately, worse was what I got as we went up the mountain. The breakfasts of twelve inch peach pancakes suddenly turned into possibly the most disgusting meals I have ever kept down. It began with the thickest oatmeal a plastic spoon can dig into without breaking, which included cornmeal for some horrific reason I am still unsure of. Next came the powdered milk made from water we had to chop through ice to get to. If you thought the sticky, pasty, semi-warm oatmeal was bad; the Antarctic milk quickly turned eating into jaw exercise. The dry cereal came next. I m not sure how the Special K got itself into this mix, but it added nothing in the way of redeeming taste value. In fact it probably made it worse, no more spoon and swallow, we had to chew now, extending the misery of our poor taste buds. The crowning item of this masterpiece of a meal was half a canned peach, a welcome friend. It did not help much and now I can no longer eat peaches. Every time I taste a peach, everything comes back to me: the congealed oat/corn meal, the sandy ice milk Like a bad break up, the peaches I once loved now are detested almost above the oatmeal that caused it.

Above base camp, everything changed not just the food. The base camp air that had eventually grown to feel thick was gone. The days became walking, eating, and sleeping. They had not been much more up to this point, but now that was it. Wake up, eat, walk for often eight hours, eat, and then sleep. The only thing that kept the monotony from being mind numbing was the scenery that only got better with the altitude. More and more mountains became visible with seemingly every step.

By camp three, 19,200 feet, the sister peak that had once loomed just as high as the hidden summit was below us. Like hundreds of other far off peaks, the fact that this one was now below us only made me realize how far we had actually come, and how daunting the task ahead of us was. Soon those mountains and just about everything would be gone from my view. Aconcagua would soon live up to its reputation of unforgiving winds, the Cordillea Blanca.

My first morning at camp three seemed calm enough. The first thing I noticed as I peeked out the tent was the cool looking cloud over the summit. I would soon realize that the cool looking cloud was bad news. Hearing the zipper of our other tent door, I looked over to see Willi s grizzled face: Get out and rock down your tent, that cloud means bad winds, soon. Very quickly I would realize just how right he was.

The storm started innocently enough, lightly falling snow with little wind. It did not stay that way. Soon the mountainside that had previous seemed serene, almost tame would prove the old saying: you never conquer a mountain, only survive it. The next day and a half would be spent in the tent, a wholly unenjoyable experience. Lying in our sleeping bags, there was a limited amount of things we could do. For me there was but one choice, sleep. By the tenth hour, that was no longer an option. The storm was no longer the pretty, it was the scary.

The winds were constant and terrible, gusts of over a hundred miles an hour at times. If we opened the doors, it was not for long as the wind would fill the tent with snow, blowing in at all angles. Soon, the tent did not even need to be open for it to snow inside. The water vapor from our breath would quickly freeze on the ceiling of our tent and almost as quickly be shaken loose, sending the snow onto our unsuspecting and previously warm faces.

Our storm experience had been probably the best. It came as little surprise when three of our teammates decided not to continue up with us. The storm had ruined them. One tent had been ripped to shreds as I slept twenty feet away. While they crawled to another tent, others spent the night with their backs bracing the tent from the wind in a futile attempt to hold the tent up.

After the storm we moved to Camp Four, 20,600 feet, the last camp before the summit. We would spend only one night here, three men to a tent. As we settled in for the night, the shadow of the summit settled upon the clouds below, casting a beautiful but ominous shadow on the clouds and peaks below. With three men and all their gear sardined inside our tent, there was not much sleeping.

My steps, slow and crunching slowly took me away from Camp Four. Today was different. Today was the culmination of months of work, physical preparation, money making and of course climbing: Summit Day. The occasional lighthearted jokes that had filled the trip were silenced. However, the day was far from silent. The sounds of my own breathing filled my ears. I was one huge lung, burning, empty, gasping for air at every opportunity. My body, buried beneath fleece, Gore-Tex, and goose down was quickly past the brink of exhaustion. Eventually the only thing that kept me going was my determination, the same determination that could kill me.

But step after step I continued. Step, breath, breath, breath, step again. Hours piled on hours. Step, breath, breath, breath, step again. Slowly, very slowly the summit got closer, but so did the turn around time. If we had not made the summit by four, we would be turned around. I could not let that happen.

You ok? asked my guide.

Yeah, I managed to rasp out between breaths.

You re gonna have to give me more than that.

What? This was not good. He thought I was having serious problems. Was I? We had already lost one team member to cerebral edema. It was not my fault I was at the back of the back. My crampons had fallen off three times. All I could think about now was that he was going to turn me back. After everything, I was going to be turned back a quarter mile before the summit.

Really, I m doing fine, I said with needed confidence.

For hours remaining before the summit, I had the horrible thought in the back of my head. Was I going to be turned around? We were in the Cantaleta, the toughest part of the climb. A half a mile of sand and small rocks this is possibly the worst footing possible. Every step forward was followed by a thoroughly discouraging slide backward. You could try to kick steps into the loose footing, but that took more work. Walking faster only made you slide further back and get more winded.

The summit snuck up on me. During only our third break, Willi told us that the summit was fifteen minutes away. I was going to make it. That was all I could think of. As I traversed the final turn the tears came, warm as they slowly froze to my windburnt face. I was going to make it! The burn immediately left my lungs and legs. My head no longer pounded unceasingly. Snow that had been lightly falling for an hour suddenly became beautiful instead of annoying. The beauty of my surroundings finally became apparent as I lifted my head from trail in front of my feet for the first time in hours. Before I knew it, I was there, the summit. It was nothing special to look at, not much different than the rock and snow that made up the rest the mountain. Not only did seeing that small spot on the roof hemisphere prove that I had summit Mt Aconcagua, it proved to me that I could do it. I could and had summited the Aconcagua, and I could and will do so much more.